terror management theory

“It’s a preexisting condition,” Jon explains, sipping more bitter tea. “I sort of got—hm. You know Spiderman?”
Tim raises an eyebrow.
“Heard of him, yeah.”
Jon nods, studying his tea.
“It’s sort of like that,” he says. “A spider killed and ate me when I was a child, and now I can’t stay dead.”
-
Resurrection isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Notes:

*finally edited 5/3 for those pesky italic spaces + a few minor things that bugged me.
this started as a dumb joke about how much I detest resurrection tropes, and then I started writing it, and then it got sad and violent and long (while still being very dumb in places). I was a little unsure about tagging it, and therefore erred on the side of caution. I hope I covered everything - just bear in mind that despite the frequent less-than-serious tone, it still is about some arguably heavy themes? so if that kind of flippancy bothers you, please be sure to take care!
some more detailed warnings not in the tags include temporary child death (right at the beginning), smoking, one instance of drinking alcohol, discussion of self-harm (in relation to canonical injuries), canon-typical police brutality in the form of Daisy, canon-typical paranoia, vomiting, minor description of burns, and it’s in the tags but I’m going to reiterate this one— death? just as a prevalent theme.
as I said, I’m erring on the side of caution with these warnings, but still, if I missed any tags or warnings, please don't hesitate to drop it in the comments.
also shoutout to @dustorange and @citrustrees for being so patient and supportive with me and my constant messaging about how long this story was getting, don't know what I would have done without being able to bug you with my ideas/ominously vague questions.
final note, this is fairly different in style and characterization from my normal stuff! just trying new things, but I hope you enjoy it all the same.
alright, onto the story.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

“So the deathless man wants water, but none of my bottles or ladles will fit through the hole, and we sit there, the deathless man and I, in silence, and he is very thirsty, you understand, but never irritable. He does not complain. He asks me what I am doing here, and I tell him I am here for the dying, and he says, what a coincidence, he is too.”

Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

Jon dies when he’s eight years old. It’s upsetting, to say the least.

The door – the blood-crusted door he’ll never find again – shuts behind him. Jon, covered in black gore, sticky with gray and clinging web, stares at it for exactly six seconds. Then, reasonably, he starts screaming bloody murder.

He stumbles home hysterical, only somewhat quieting when his grandmother comes out into the front yard to see the racket and promptly drags him inside.

“It got me,” he sobs into his hands. “It— the, the, Mr. Spider, he, he—the, the book, it got me, it—”

“Hush, you’re alright,” his grandmother says, pulling him closer. The kitchen is cramped and smells strongly of dish soap. “What have you got all over you? Is this mud? Goodness Jonathan, did you fall in a ditch?”

“It wasn’t—” his breath hitches, and he clings tighter, tight so even Mr. Spider won’t be able to drag him away with his awful gray strings. “The book got me. He got Matthew, we, we— ”

“You’re right here, Jonathan,” his grandmother soothes as he breaks into fresh sobs. Her hands on his shoulders feel real. Her shirt against his cheek feels real. The towel that she reaches down with, smudging spider guts and cobweb from his face, feels very real.

He’s…here. He really is here. But Mr. Spider got him.

Jon knows he’s smart. He knows about hospitals, and sickness, and death, and that it’s where people go and don’t come back. Mum used to talk about places, names he can’t remember that his grandmother has never repeated. The names don’t matter, though, because once you go there, you don’t come back. Mum didn’t. Da didn’t. Matthew didn’t, and Jon had been trying so hard to pull him away from the door, and he’d been too close, and then it got him—

“I’m not supposed to be here,” he whispers into his grandmother’s waist. “It got me. I’m not supposed to be here. I shouldn’t be here.”

“Hush,” she says, pressing a brisk kiss into his hair. “Go scrub all that muck off your face. I’ll make dinner and you can tell me all about sleeping in a ditch.” She laughs a little to herself, then sighs. “Goodness, Jonathan, what are we going to do with you?”

It turns out that dying at a young age is not very good for your health. Or general psychological development.

Jon, sitting in on a psych lecture that’s droning on about developmental stages, considers this. Yeah, he thinks, doodling a spider in the corner of his notebook and then scratching it out immediately with a shudder. Yeah, that’s probably true.

He used to dream about it basically every night. Drove his gran crazy, the waking up and wandering down to her room just to stand at the door like a creepy little ghoul child. She’d told him, when he was a little older, she had had to stop watching child-demon horror movies because of him. Always a nice thing to hear from your grandmother.

Honestly, he probably still would get the nightmares, if he didn’t take a hard turn into insomnia sometime around thirteen. Now he just doesn’t sleep, so basically problem solved.

He tries to focus on the lecture— mortality salience is a crucial step in conceptualizing death, and links to denial of— but his eye catches on another student sitting just a row in front of him, down and to the right. She’s staring right at him.

Jon shifts a bit, looking pointedly at his notes, then the lecturer, then his notes again, but he can feel the woman’s gaze like a brand. He sneaks a peek. Considers writing it’s rude to stare on his completely empty page of notes and balling it up to chuck at her. That might be considered more rude than the staring, so he refrains, and just pretends to pay attention to whatever the professor’s saying about existential fear until the class lets out. It occurs to him sometime around Lang’s three classifications of death anxiety that people stare when they think someone’s attractive. When they want to ask them out. Oh, god.

The lecturer dismisses them. Jon bolts.

He doesn’t make it.

The woman effectively blocks his path—damn those narrow aisles—and waits until he’s stopped pretending to look past her to offer him a crooked smile. There’s a gap between her teeth, small but noticeable.

“You’re—sorry, do we know each other?” she asks, then gives a little laugh when he shakes his head in mute horror. Is that a pick up line? That seems like it could be a pick up line. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to stare, earlier, you just—you seem familiar. Just those kinds of vibes I guess. Or maybe we’re in another class together?”

Her voice is...pleasant. Weirdly genuine. He still kind of hopes she’s just a murderer, and not trying to be friendly, but now he feels a bit bad about it.

“Probably not, if you’re studying psychology,” he says apologetically. “I’m not actually in this class, I’m only taking it because...” I was eaten by a spider as a child and then ostensibly resurrected and this class has a section on the developmental psychology of death and I was sort of morbidly curious enough to sign up to audit it. “It caught my eye, I suppose?”

“Funny,” the woman says, with an expression that explains she thinks it’s not funny in a laughing way. “Sort of the same for me. Just seemed interesting, you know?”

There’s a short pause, where Jon mentally reviews the last five seconds and reassures himself that he hadn’t spoken out loud. Though the odds of them both being eaten by a spider and brought back to life after would be infinitesimal.

“I’m Jonathan,” he blurts. The memory of his grandmother mutters something in his ear and he holds out his hand too suddenly, nearly dropping his blank notebook. “Or. Um. Jon. Sims.”

The woman smiles again. The gap in her teeth is still there. It’s….charming? Jon feels vaguely charmed.

“Georgie. Barker,” she says, taking his hand with a fake sort of ceremony. “Nice to meet you, Jon. Now, did you catch anything from that lecture? I don’t have any friends in this class to steal notes from, and as much as I wanted to learn about the whole death psychology thing, this professor is such a bore...”

Jon blinks as Georgie leads him down the narrow stairs. Friends. That’s a word. He can do friends. And if she asks him out, well, maybe he’ll just die. A convenient meteor, or a sudden heart attack, or a thin cardboard storybook.

Jon doesn’t die when Georgie asks him out. He doesn’t die when one date turns into two, and three, and then a regular thing with a label and everything, and then only almost dies when she first asks him to spend the night in that weird coded way he can never be sure of. He doesn’t die when he shakily admits to her what he can and can’t give her; he doesn’t die when she pulls him closer anyway, presses her lips to his hair and says a confusingly casual and emphatic ‘okay’. He doesn’t die then, but it kind of feels like he did, and he doesn’t very much want to be resurrected.

Sometime later, Jon doesn’t die when they firmly and carefully break each others’ hearts. He doesn’t die when the only time he hears her voice is when she’s reading out goofy advertisements into his headphones. He doesn’t die from the empty space next to him in the mornings, which is ridiculous to mourn, because he’d always been fine alone before. And it’s better, anyway— when he does die, which he feels will be very soon, he won’t be leaving anyone behind.

In fact, Jon doesn’t die in university at all, despite his professors’ best efforts. He lauds their attempts, as fruitless as they are. Even a few years drifting through academia doesn’t kill him, and as excruciating it is dealing with the same overstated opinions from the same twelve, loud people in his program, he survives.

It’s disconcerting, all this not dying. Feels a bit like Mr. Spider is mocking him, keeping him waiting so long. It’s frankly a bit rude, if anything—at this point Jon would prefer for whatever’s going to kill him to at least set a date he can put in his calendar.

Which is why it’s somewhat of a relief when he lands an interview at the Magnus Institute.

“So, Jon—can I call you Jon?”

Jon nods fervently, unable to stop staring at the man across the desk. He’s aware of certain academic circles that carry very specific...aesthetics, and has never begrudged them. But he’s been literally unable to speak because he’s been too busy trying not to count the eyes embroidered on the interviewer’s suit.

The man—Jon immediately forgot his name, and is hoping with all his might that it doesn’t come up ever again—smiles blandly.

“You’re interviewing for a research position here.”

“...Yes. Yes, I am.”

The man looks at him. The eyes on the suit look at him. The skull on the shelf behind the desk looks at him.

“Very good,” the man nods, pen moving across the page. Jon honestly can’t tell if he actually writes anything. “And what brought you to the Institute?”

Death? he almost says, question mark included. A spider?

He does not say that. In fact, Jon in the years to come will never actually remember what he said, nor most of the contents of that interview, except through the lens of a vague, panic-induced haze that only begins to recede as the man shakes his hand at the very end. The golden eyes dangling from his ears stare at Jon judgmentally.

“Thank you,” Jon manages to say. The skull is still staring at him, and Jon is sort of beginning to realize he’s definitely going to die here. “And, and thank you for, for the opportunity, Mr. —”

Jon’s mouth almost betrays him, his panic-numb brain caught on the man’s eyes boring into his along with all the million little ones, and the first name that comes to mind in this cramped Institute office is Magnus. At the last second his gaze falls on the plaque nearly hidden behind a hideous eye-shaped paperweight.

Thank goodness. He’s fairly certain he wouldn’t have gotten the job if he’d called Mr. Bouchard by the name of some decrepit long-dead founder.

“Bouchard,” he says, forcing a smile. Mr. Bouchard—Jon can’t actually see the first name on the plaque—looks at him strangely, but shakes his hand.

“No, Jon,” Mr. Bouchard says, and Jon gets the sudden impression that yes, he’s going to die here, and Mr. Bouchard is maybe hoping that will happen. “Thank you.”

If his Institute is anything to go by, Jon is willing to hazard a guess that Jonah Magnus had been either a legitimate secret cult leader, or just immeasurably, unutterably insane. He’s betting on the former as a symptom of the latter, but either way Jon has decided that the man in the painting outside of Elias’ office is probably going to be the one to kill him for good.

Indirectly, sure, but it’s definitely his fault that the Institute is a huge, hideous knot of supernatural potential causes of death. Who goes out of their way to collect Leitners for any reason but burning them? Who has an entire department devoted to cursed and evil objects to study them? Who has an employment clause stating that you must reach a psychiatrist-approved threshold of psychological distress before you quit for it?

What idiot with a deathwish would want to work at a place that has a higher mortality-and-or-severe mental breakdown rate than the McDonald’s national average?

The answer is, of course Jon. And all of his coworkers, but to be fair, most of his coworkers are very weird people. Just the other day a woman stopped by his desk and told him her name was Sasha, and that he needed to change all his online passwords from password789 because it wasn’t safe, or something.

He thinks they might be friends now.

Surviving at the Institute so far requires a degree of patience that Jon doesn’t particularly consider himself to possess, and it’s anyone’s guess as to how much longer he’ll last here. How he’s already lasted this long is a mystery, even if...three weeks isn’t exactly lengthy. Another mystery. Added onto the mysteries Jon keeps at his desk on an inconspicuous bright yellow legal notepad.

is THE BOOK here
~~what is the wifi password~~ ceaseless_router1818
why don’t they cordon off the broom closet that’s eaten three janitors
am I the only one who’s noticed that the broom closet ate three janitors
~~what is the name of the researcher who keeps sitting with me at lunch~~ Tim
why does Tim keep sitting with me at lunch
why does no one talk about the chanting that sometimes comes from the Archives late at night
what does the Institute motto have to do with literally anything we do we aren’t a bloody surveillance company
why does Elias look at me Like That///~~can I go to HR if the head of the institute asks to steal my soul~~ HR haunted/evil???
~~who keeps stealing my good pens~~ Sasha

There are more, but they’re the ones he doesn’t write down. Like the one that makes him think that if he does put it in so many words, he’s going to find out—in an unpleasant and immediately fatal manner. Like, why he can’t seem to shake the feeling of being watched no matter where he goes. The prickle on his neck that keeps on setting off his instinct to freeze up and look behind him.

I’m going to die here, Jon sing-songs to himself as he peruses the library catalogue. It keeps glitching, little tricolor rectangles occasionally flickering into nonsensical arrangements. Okay, not quite nonsensical, it’s definitely a flashing technicolor eye, but he’s pretty sure acknowledging it is going to get him dead faster.

He slaps the side of the computer in frustration. It’s ancient just like half of the equipment here, and if whatever monstrous staring secret the Institute is hiding doesn’t get him first, maybe one of the floppy disks will electrocute him. Or something. He doesn’t actually know how floppy disks work.

“Please!” a voice says behind him, and Jon whips around. If something at the Institute is going to kill him, he’d rather see what it is before it happens.

What was Langs’ classification? Predatory death anxiety? Something like that. Something that wants to cause him harm, blah blah, defense mechanisms, he really should have paid better attention to that particular lecture—

“Don’t hit the computers,” the man before him finishes lamely. His face transforms into a sheepish smile. “They’re barely hanging on as it is, and we really can’t afford to have one break on us.”

“It’s broken as it is,” Jon responds, gesturing to the flickering monitor. “Why do you think I was hitting it?”

The man sighs, making a please get out of the way so I can fix whatever you’ve broken little motion, and Jon obliges with only a small scowl. He hadn’t been doing anything, just using the catalogue like a normal researcher looking for normal books. Nothing to see here, nobody’s dead.

The man presses down three buttons. The screen immediately calms. Jon does not cross his arms.

“There we go,” the man says with a quick smile at him. He has...very brown eyes. “Don’t worry, these computers are finicky if you’re not used to them.”

“I’m not interested in getting used to obsolete technology,” Jon sniffs, already moving back to the keyboard as the man steps back. Jon waits, quite aware of him not leaving. After tapping his fingers on the mouse, he looks over his shoulder. “I believe I can handle it from here. Goodbye.”

“O-oh,” the man stammers. “I mean, I work here, if you need any—if you’re looking for something, I can probably—I can help?”

Jon purses his lips.

“I’m Martin. Blackwood?” the man offers. Like a question. “You’re…Jonathan, right? Sims?”

Jon stabs the L on the keyboard.

“Right.”

The man—Martin—doesn’t seem to get the please leave me alone to uncover the horrifying secrets of the Institute via the library catalogue vibes he’s giving off. His funeral, Jon supposes. He tracks down the E, the I and the T in quick succession, then freezes, looking at Martin.

His funeral. Right, because people die. Had he forgotten that? No, he hadn’t forgotten that. He thought about it every second of his spider-damned life.

“You should leave.“

“Are you looking for our Leitners?” Martin ignores Jon’s heroic and fruitless effort to not doom another person who can’t get undoomed if he gets eaten by a spider. “Oh, there’s the reason it glitched. Yeah, you can’t search for those on the computers, they have to use a paper catalogue.”

“What?” Jon asks sharply. As if on cue, the screen flashes. The blocky little pupil stares out between them, and Jon turns the monitor away with a scowl. “What?”

“Plus we don’t actually keep them in the library?” Martin says, shifting from foot to foot. “Sort of a hazard, really. Sorry.” Martin seems genuinely apologetic that he doesn’t keep murderous books in his immediate area of work.

“Where do they keep them?” Jon asks, irritated. “I need—I need to know if they have one. A specific one. For. Research purposes. I am a researcher. In Research.”

“...Artefact storage, mostly,” Martin shrugs, looking at him strangely. “I guess you could ask Sonja? I know they’re all pretty cagey about that stuff, but if you have an assignment involving one, they could get it for you—“

“I don’t want them to get it for me, I just want to know if it’s here,” Jon snaps, gathering his bag. “You clearly can’t help me, so good day. It would be best if we didn’t meet again.”

Best really, if Martin never met him, but considering how much time he’s wasted with this conversation, Jon is happy for the sentiment to go both ways.

He storms from the desk with what he hopes is urgency and finality and other dignified researcher adjectives. Martin doesn’t follow him, and Jon only slightly clips his shoulder on the door before exiting the library altogether.

Jon does not die in research. It’s a bit of a shock, honestly. To everyone.

“How are you not dead yet!” Tim laughs, as Jon stomps out the embers still smouldering on his jacket. “I mean seriously, Jon, that was—

“I genuinely wish I knew,” Jon says flatly, crouching down to inspect the jacket. He frowns, shaking it out. “Dammit. I liked this one.”

“Maybe you should have thought about that before walking into the spooky burnt house where things have been reported to—” Tim checks his notepad. “Spontaneously catch fire?”

“Spooky,” Jon scoffs. “The report said that the victim said they were cleaning it when the fire started.”

“Yeah,” Tim says, fixing Jon with his what-the-hell look. Jon is beginning to become familiar with it. “That is exactly what the report said. And you were literally on fire two seconds ago for no reason, ergo, spooky.”

“They were also smoking at the time,” Jon says dryly, pulling on his jacket. He peers over his shoulder which is quite warm. Not on fire, though. Just a bit charred. “It was an accident, Tim, I already verified with the victim what really happened. They were smoking, plus whatever cleaning agent they were using, equals housefire. They just “forgot” to include that in the report.”

“So we’re just going to forget about the part where you went in there and then came out on fire?”

Jon meets Tim’s gaze stubbornly. Tim looks back, looking almost amused.

Tim is...a bit weird. He works at the Magnus Institute, of course he is. But a different weird.

He used to be quiet, someone Jon found quite peaceable to work next to late into the night as they both pretended to not hear the occasional chanting drifting up from the Archives.

God knows what Gertrude did down there, Jon wasn’t about to confront a woman he had met exactly once and gotten the overbearing impression that she knew he had died, and was not impressed by it. Tim said he was being dramatic.

Tim says a lot of things, actually, because whatever quietness had affected him in the early days of working at the Institute had worn off though, and now Jon has the misfortune of being trapped in a friendship with someone who uses the word spooky to describe anything from missing pens—he’s covering for Sasha, Jon knows it— to Jon’s sandwich topping preferences.

“Yes, we are,” Jon says finally, brushing past Tim. “Though if you must know. I may have. Seen a spider.”

“And tried to what, set it on fire?”

Jon pinches his eyes shut. He is going to die working for the Institute and it’s going to be from embarrassment.

“I may have,” he says carefully. “Taken a smoke—”

Tim’s eyes bug, a grin creeping up his face.

“No way, you really—”

“It was on my shoulder,” he says through gritted teeth. “And it surprised me. I had the cigarette in my hand. And may have reacted. Impulsively.”

“By setting yourself on fire.” Tim is visibly biting his lip, shoulders trembling slightly. “Right. Jon. That’s.”

“Please shut up.”

“That’s—”

“Stop.”

Tim makes a noise into his hands that might be a bark of laughter, or maybe a shout of vague distress. Jon doesn’t ask, just crosses his arms tightly.

“Are you quite done?” he says, glaring. “We should be getting back.”

“You—” Tim composes himself in a single long breath, before putting a hand on Jon’s burnt jacket shoulder. “You really hate spiders, don’t you?”

“What gave you that impression,” Jon snaps, and Tim raises his hands, still grinning.

“Hey, hey, no judgement here.” He shrugs, elbowing Jon. His tone sobers a bit. “I’d jump at a chance to set a clown on fire, personally.”

That’s actually quite reasonable in Jon’s opinion, but he just gives a tight nod, pulls his burnt jacket tighter, and heads down the walk.

Tim catches up with him as he draws out another cigarette at the street’s edge, beneath a pool of yellow light. He half expects birds to start up singing through the dark.

“You shouldn’t smoke those, Jon,” Tim elbows him again. In a friendly sort of way. It’s not unpleasant, and Jon pauses. He likes to think that they’re both ignoring how much his hands are shaking “Bad for your health. ‘Those thing’s’ll kill you’ and all that.”

Jon rolls the cigarette between his fingers for two seconds, tapping the box. Tim is watching him, a small line between his brows.

“I’m going to live forever,” Jon grumbles, but stuffs the box back in his pocket.

Tim laughs brightly, and Jon might be going to die at the Institute due to yet-indeterminable causes, but at the very least Tim seems like he might care when it happens.

So this is how I’m going to die here, Jon thinks appreciatively. It’s a bit of a relief, to know for sure. But the Archives have a—Gertrude Robinson pending—mortality rate that even beats out Artefact Storage.

At least people quit Artefact storage. People in the Archives apparently just work here til they perish in a mysterious housefire, or encounter mysterious surgical complications, or go missing, where the mysteriousness is implied.

Jon knows ‘mysterious’ is just a euphemism for ‘violent’ and ‘painful’ e.g. Jon mysteriously died and was brought back to life as a child, Jon once had some very mysterious food poisoning from a salad once and now hates them, and Jon is now going to mysteriously get killed by whatever lives in this weird and dusty version of hell.

It is such a relief to have that sorted.

He pages idly through the papers on his new and currently bloodless desk, wondering where Tim and Sasha are. Hopefully the Archives monster will be too busy eating him to worry about them, but he supposes he should still keep track of their whereabouts. Being their...boss, and all. Ergh. He does not like that. And he still hasn’t solved the mystery of Elias’ weird, probably-sexist favoritism.

There’s a loud clatter outside his door, followed by swearing, and then something….scampering?

Jon rubs his temples. ‘Did you hear about Jonathan Sims,’ they’ll say? His heart is already beginning to pound painfully, pulling tight in his chest like a rubber band. ‘Got mysteriously eaten his first day as Archivist! Pity, yeah. He always had really nice pens, shame I won’t be able to steal them anymore.’

Sasha will probably last longer as Head Archivist anyway, he thinks hysterically. Probably for the best! He takes a breath at the creak of the door. When he opens his eyes, he will die, and he will stay dead, and—

“Hey, sorry, you haven’t seen a dog, have you?”

Jon opens his eyes. Martin...Blueforest? Yellowbark? is standing in the doorway with a sheepish grin and looks very much not like a monster about to murder him. Something very cold and tightly coiled inside Jon’s chest relaxes, just a touch.

Then he realizes he asked a question and right, people answer those.

“I’m s—sorry, what?”

“A dog,” Martin Greenwood says, still sheepish. “A spaniel, I think.”

Jon’s brain stalls. A dog. He’s seen a dog before. Several times. Many dogs. That cannot be what Martin Whitetree is asking. Jon’s mouth does not care.

“In general, or…?”

“No,” Martin Orangeoak looks apologetic, but he could also just be laughing at Jon. “No, in the Archives.”

“Why.” It feels like Jon’s brain is being purposefully slow. His chest still hurts from the sudden draining of adrenaline, the sudden combination of unconcluded panic battling against the clipped sense of disappointment. He clears his throat. “Would there be a dog, in the Archives.”

“Because I may have…” Martin Purpleleaf winces. He’s still smiling, through the wince. It seems his eyes have not changed color in the last four or so years. Jon wonders if he should congratulate him over it. “Let him in?”

“What? Why?” Jon stands. If he’s not dead, then he should probably actually, like, do his job. If that entails dog-catching in the Archives, then so be it. He’s not about to let an innocent dog get eaten by a broom closet. “Why are you even down here? Shouldn’t you be in the library?”

“Oh I—” the smile finally drops from his face. “I sort of. Um. Got transferred? To work in the Archives. Elias said. I’m Mart—”

“Martin. I know.” Jon sniffs. “We’ve met. I didn’t forget. I don’t forget names.”

“Right, in the library with the—wow, that was a good while ago, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

He has a wild panicked thought that Martin will for some reason ask him what his last name is. His next guess is Greybark, which sounds like some sort of demented new-age tea brand.

Martin does no such thing, just shifts from foot to foot. Jon tries not to think about the implications of Elias assigning someone to work with him, let alone someone who sticks out in Jon’s mind as the person at the Institute who thwarted his very first mystery. Which isn’t quite fair, Artefact Storage had been just as extremely unhelpful, but Jon can’t help how he feels.

“So, um. The dog.” Martin winces again. “It’s still sort of….”

There’s a crash outside. Martin, somehow, winces even deeper.

“Right.” Jon sighs, rounding the desk. Good bosses are supposed to be confident, he’d read last night, hunched over one of his many open tabs on Archiving and bossing people around. Confident! Approachable! No nonsense! Organized!

He thinks he can manage at least one of those a day, assuming he doesn’t get torn to shreds by a spaniel in the next five minutes. Better a spaniel than a spider.

“Right let’s...catch a dog.” He stops in the middle of the Archives, Martin shadowing him. “Can’t have got far.”

“I think it’s in the stacks?” Martin says hesitantly. There’s a crash from somewhere deep in the shelving, and Jon meets Martin’s eyes flatly. Martin— whose eyes are still, somehow, quite warm and brown—winces again.

“Follow me,” Jon says with a scowl. Confident, no-nonsense, check. He’ll save the approachable for Thursdays. And organized for whenever he figures out exactly what he’s supposed to be doing down here.

“Is there a reason you let it in?” he asks as they creep through the stacks. “Or were you just trying to—” to ruin my day, he wants to say, but that seems less no-nonsense, more just mean. He pauses, turning. Martin is not behind him.

He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘Did you hear about Jonathan Sims? Oh yes, he let one of his assistants get murdered up by the occultists who sometimes do their chanting in the Archives. On the very first day, can you believe?’

“Look what I found!”

“Jesus!” Jon will never admit how high he jumped, but it wasn’t high enough. Frankly he should have packed up and left right then, written his resignation letter, sorry Elias, I’m pretty sure you wanted to sacrifice me to whatever lives down here but you failed to inform me that the assistant you supplied me with was out to kill me first—”

“What the hell are you waiting for!” he says, casting around for a book to smash it with, or maybe a chemical weapon. “Kill it already!”

“No, no, it’s fine, really!” Martin says, shifting his hands so the spider scuttles up his thumb. Oh, so he’s insane. “It’s just a common house spider, used to get loads of these—”

“Just kill it already,” Jon repeats, eyeing it. It seems to pause on Martin's knuckle, staring right at Jon.

How is this just the first day? He needs to quit immediately. Go back to research, where he belongs, and where he can set spiders on fire whenever he sees them. There’s a rule against sources of ignition down here.

“It’s not hurting anyone,” Martin says, pretending to be reasonable when he’s clearly a fucking lunatic. It’s perched on his wrist now, could bite right into his vein, he’d be dead in seconds. “They’re good for the environment, Jon, I’m not just going to kill—”

“Fine! Fine, then get. It. Out of here,” Jon snaps. Confident! No-nonsense! He’s great at this. Martin looks at him, probably in awe of his leadership. The spider looks at Jon, probably because it knows he’s supposed to be dead by its father’s hand. You’re not supposed to be here! its beady little eyes say.

Jon’s chest twists. The shout bursts from him. “Now!”

Martin blanches.

“Sor—sorry! I’ll— I’ll take it outside.” He cups his hands, murmuring something— good lord, is he communing with the thing? Is Martin the monster in the basement? — before vanishing out of the aisle.

Jon breathes for several deafening seconds, feeling like he’d just run a marathon. There’s a knotted wire hovering just beneath his sternum like a heart attack.

Then it occurs to him that he just yelled at an employee. Out of fear— rightful, correct fear— but yelled all the same. Is he the kind of boss that yells at people?

That’s slightly better than Elias’s managing style, where he kind of lurks in his staring emerald suit and makes ominous comments about Jon’s future. As if he doesn’t know that Jon already knows he’s going to die here.

He trudges back out of the stacks, papers scattering like leaves, and is immediately met face to face with a grinning spaniel. Tim, also grinning, pops out from behind it.

Jon needs to quit immediately. All the mysteries of the world aren’t worth this torment. He’s supposed to die here, not be tortured.

“I didn’t know we got to have a mascot!” Tim is saying. Sasha is snickering, probably at the look on Jon’s face as the dog meets his eye. It doesn’t look rabid and/or cursed. But then, they never do.

“It is not our mascot,” Jon says, going cross eyed as Tim shoves the dog in his face. “Please take it somewhere it can harass somebody who deserves it. Leave it in HR.”

“Is that—” The dog licks Jon’s face. It probably has rabies, and now he has rabies, and is going to die of rabies. Excellent. “An order, boss?”

“Told you, power’s already going to his head,” Sasha calls from where she’s very quickly setting up a battle station. Seeing a device that’s not from 1992 right next to a stack of literal tape recorders gives Jon whiplash. “Did I hear you yelling at Martin? Martin? ”

Jon…leans his forehead against the dog’s. It licks his cheek sympathetically.

“There was. A spider,” he admits. “I didn’t know Martin was such an... enthusiast for arachnids. I was caught off guard. And he let this one in.” He nods at the dog, who whines. “I think it escaped from Artefact Storage. It’s probably evil, to be honest. Remember that mouse that ate its owner? With the human teeth?”

“It was a hamster, actually, get it right,” Sasha calls, waving her glasses lazily. “Hamsters are way more likely to kill you in cold blood anyway, human teeth or no.”

“Well, let’s ask.” Tim holds the dog level with his own face, staring at it suspiciously. “Are you an evil vessel of a dog that’s been put here by some dastardly plan concocted by the Institute’s best hugger, tea maker, and fashion icon, Martin K. Blackwood? Are you here to assassinate Jon on his behalf?”

The dog whines.

“Well?” Jon asks hopefully. If he’s going to die on his first day, he would like to do it before Sasha finishes setting up her desk, so she doesn’t have to start over when she moves into his office

“Inconclusive, boss,” Tim reports, tucking the dog beneath his arm. “He’s a tough one to crack. Pretty sure I’d do better if I gave him David’s lunch.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Jon says flatly. “But by all means.”

“But seriously, cut Martin a break,” Tim continues. “He probably didn’t even know about your thing with spiders. And I don’t know him super well, but I know he’s a normal person here for normal reasons and not, like, conspiring against you.”

“It’s the Magnus Institute, Tim,” Jon says in disgust. He gives the evil dog a quick scratch on the head. “Nobody here is here for normal reasons.”

“Top theory on why Elias is here, then?” Sasha asks, waving her glasses. “My guess is tax fraud. Only it’s not a guess, and I have proof.”

“Yeah, and Sasha’s here for the blackmail,” Tim says, nodding. Then he pauses. “Wait, really?”

“That’s. Not surprising, for Elias.” Jon frowns at the dog, patting it before Tim turns. “I think he wants to kill me and steal my soul, personally. But it’s possible I’m projecting.”

Tim grins, ferrying the dog towards the door.

“Nah, bosses are just like that. Starting to get the vibes from you, too, yelling at innocent assistants.”

“Innocent,” Jon grumbles under his breath, turning back to his office. Maybe he can get a head start on being organized, since he already failed approachable.

Just as Jon is about to make it to the safety of a closed door, Martin returns to the Archives a bit out of breath.

His eyes are still very brown when he pauses by Jon, says, “house spiders really are good for the environment, you know,” and gives a last sheepish smile, and this.

Is just really.

Not ideal.

Jon is beginning to think he’s not going to die in the Archives.

Well, no, he’s definitely going to die in the Archives, but it’s not from what he thought he would. He’s fairly confident going to be something far more mundane than his soul getting eaten by something in the stacks.

It’s like this:

“This is the greatest moment of my life.”

“I’m just saying, there is no way that’s natural —

“I feel like we should film this.”

“And I’m saying, it’s absolutely ridiculous to suggest there is such a thing as a ghost spider, Martin. He was there for more than a week, the web —“

“ Should I film this? Sash, get a camera.”

“It’s more likely than— Jon, look me in the eye and tell me a man being killed by being encased in spiderwebs was natural.”

“Tim, turn that off,” Jon snaps. Tim hides the phone guiltily as Jon crosses his arms.

“There is no. Such. Thing,” he enunciates, looking Martin directly and unwaveringly in the eye. “As. Ghost spiders.”

“Jon, that’s—”

“Carlos Vittery,” he says, through gritted teeth. “Died. Naturally.”

Martin stares back, disbelief written on his face.

“Jon. Seriously.”

“Mr. Blackwood—“

“Holy shit he got Mr. Blackwood-ed—“

“As I see you cannot be convinced by things like common sense and rationality, perhaps you will be convinced by evidence.” Jon pulls the statement neatly from the files, and slaps it into Martin’s hands. “You can be the one to investigate Mr. Vittery’s spider issue. I expect a thorough report by tomorrow. With proper formatting, rather than your usual fare. Is that clear? ”

Martin looks down at the file in his hands. Then back up at Jon. Jon holds his breath please don’t say some weird challenge about me going myself to prove you wrong I can’t I can’t I can’t I will burn that flat to the ground before I go inside it—

“Ye—Fine.” Martin hugs the file. “I—I will.”

Jon crosses his arms, then uncrosses them. Martin is still looking at him in something akin to wonder, and Sasha is subtly aiming her phone at them. A video caption pops into his head, Head Archivist vs Archival Assistant GHOST SPIDER FIGHT!!!!!

He’s...probably going to die here.

“Right. Right to the door. What? Seriously?” Jon glances over his shoulder. “A block away? That seems—fine! Fine. I’ll pick it up there. Can you seriously not drop it off any—”

The phone clicks.

“They hung up on me,” he says, affronted. “They won’t even bring it to the door.”

“Yeah, Jon, people won’t deliver to the Institute anymore,” Sasha calls. She’s sitting across from Martin, laptop out and screen undoubtedly full of blackmail on Martin’s landlord. “Remember when that pizza delivery man accidentally touched that meat table they were keeping in the breakroom?”

“Why were they keeping—” Martin starts.

“Ridiculous,” Jon mutters again, dragging his coat on. “Martin, stay. Stay here, I’ll be back with the food. Sasha, once you’ve finished sorting out his um. Leasing adjustments, go home. And lock the bloody door.”

“Sure thing, Jon,” she salutes, squinting at her screen. “Don’t worry, Martin, we’ll not have you paying rent on a wormed-up apartment.”

“Tim will be in tomorrow with whatever other amenities you need,” Jon continues, looking pointedly a foot above Martin’s gaze. Worms and near-death hadn’t changed his eye color, it seems. Jon once again fights the irrational urge to congratulate him for it. “And if you arrange your provider details to address the...phone situation, I can pick up a new one for you.”

He pauses, considering. He can feel Martin staring at him. Probably waiting for his chance to yell at him.

“But I feel it would be wise to cancel your current account,” he continues, trying to keep his tone approachable, or something. “As I’m not particularly interested in being texted ominous threats at all hours of the day and night by a...woman with some kind of homicidal infestation.”

“Jon, you really— I mean, I appreciate it, this is just—”

Jon turns on his heel and makes for the door before Martin can do something like object, or apologize, or anything other than start shouting at Jon for almost killing him.

Outside the Institute, he leans against the door, breathless. The air is warm, for March—Jon doesn’t want to imagine if it had been dead winter. If Martin had slowly frozen to death in his flat, besieged by worms, because of Jon.

It’s perfectly silent as he walks the block to the corner. He shoves his hands in his pockets, breathing very steadily, and listening to the silent street. For a second he almost thinks he catches the faint trill of a bird. But that’s ridiculous, because it’s late evening, approaching dark.

Martin almost died. Almost died, almost was dead, almost was no longer here, almost was permanently and eternally gone. Because. Of. Jon.

He presses his palms to his eyes, grumbling to himself. He should have gone to Vittery’s himself. He would have just burned the place down, and maybe Prentiss with it. But nope, he had to choose no-nonsense over fucking approachable and confident, and pressured Martin into risking his life.

He sighs, letting the wind sweep him to the curb on the corner. He waits, peering down the road and checking his phone.

He’s not stupid. He doesn’t really think ordering in food, or a new phone, or a cot is going to make up for this. But what else can he do?

Martin’s not dead. Martin’s not dead, and Jon is beginning to understand that the monster in the Archives is not what he thought it was. Martin’s not dead, and Jon is still probably going to die, and that’s—that's fine, but—

Martin is still here. That’s what Jon can maintain.

It’s not so bad, a constant, excruciating, unabating awareness of your own mortality.

For example, it gives you an odd, sort-of-courageous edge when suddenly your place of work transforms into an encroaching tide of murderous fleshworms. Lets you do things like squint at the growing mass for a moment and decide yes, you can absolutely make it to the tape recorder, because if he’s going to die now he is absolutely going to leave a record of it.

Then Martin and Sasha are dragging him away, and a door is slamming, and Sasha is wielding a corkscrew. It’s about as terrifying as the mountain of worms outside.

“That was stupid, Jon!” Sasha yells, stomping on the worm she’d worked free from his leg. She brandishes the corkscrew at him. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“I mean, not particularly, but—”

“I have another tape recorder,” Martin says, waving it frantically. His eyes—still brown, Jon notes absently—are huge and panicked. “It’s—why would you do that?”

“If you have another one, turn it on,” Jon snaps, casting around the room. “Are there any more extinguishers in here?”

They’re all here, they’re all alive. Even Jon’s alive. How bizarre. How improbable. How—

And then Sasha is gone and Tim is probably dead, and really, that makes a lot more sense. Martin will probably be gone soon, too, really it’s a miracle why he isn’t already gone after almost dying of worms. Why he would trust Jon to keep him alive when Jon couldn’t even keep himself alive.

It’s an excellent question.

“Martin...you’re not, uh—” He furrows his brows together, trying to make himself sound less of a prick for one bloody second. C’mon Jon, have some fucking empathy and imagine if you hadn’t been brought back, not for real. Imagine if you were trapped outside that door forever, staring at the bleeding edges. Imagine you died, and you stayed dead — his voice doesn’t break. “You didn’t die here, did you?”

Martin’s mouth opens and closes once.

“Wha—what? No— what?”

Alright, thinks Jon, pressing his palms to his eyes. Death of dignity and professionalism in front of Martin Blackwood had not been the sort of dying he’d been anticipating.

“Just— just the way you phrased that—” he defends in vain.

“Made you think I was a ghost?”

Martin’s expression is very plainly reading oh so he’s an idiot and Jon. Jon is very certain he’s going to die, and he’s very certain it’s going to be very soon, but at the same time he sort of wonders if he should just cut his losses and take his chances with the worms.

Secret tunnels. Why the fuck not?

“Update,” Jon pants into the recorder. “We’re going to get eaten, and—”

“And Martin’s gone,” Tim adds tightly. He’s leaning against the wall, extinguisher dangling from his hand. “God, he— I think he thought we were behind him? He was here and then he—”

“Right. Martin’s not here, and we’re going to get eaten by worms, and, and— ” He swallows thickly, throat dry. “And that’s it. We’re going to open the trapdoor, and—and that’s it.”

“You think she’s up there?” Tim says, peeling himself from the wall and staggering drunkenly. “This might go direct to the Archives, she could just be hanging out, you know, waiting to kill us.”

“Yes, Tim, I know that,” Jon spits, chest strung tight. He clutches the recorder tighter. “I—fine. Let’s. Let’s go, then. No time like the present, right?”

“Jon,” Tim pats him on the shoulder. “It’s been an honor to be eaten by worms with you.”

Jon laughs a little hysterically, before reaching for the door. This place always was going to kill him, after all.

“Ready?”

“Now—”

Jon sits bolt upright with what’s supposed to be a scream. It comes out as a disappointingly quiet wheeze.

Luckily, about three people in the immediate vicinity make up for it— he catches two full-throated shouts of terror, one high yelp that transforms into a stream of babbled what the fuck what the fuck they didn’t check his pulse what the fuck Grant you said he was dead go get the paramedics!

Jon flails a bit, mind numb with the sensation of worms gnawing through his skin as he chokes on unbreathable air and oh god, is he blind? Did the worms eat his eyes?!

Before he can properly panic, something is torn from his body and he manages a respectable muffled gurgle this time before his vision is crowded with faces and flashing lights.

“Sir? Sir can you hear me? Holy fucking Jesus christ, oh my god, you’re—did they not check his pulse — Sir, just take in a breath, you’re — Grant stop standing there and get the goddamn paramedics!”

The words begin to run together as rubbered hands brace themselves against his bloody arms— they slip, briefly, with a sensation that makes Jon sort of want to throw up— but eventually he doesn’t have to actually focus on sitting up, and instead can focus on the white, red-speckled sheet crumpled in his lap. The one that had been pulled over his face.

How odd.

“Gck,” Jon says, frowning. Then, in sudden panic as his lungs don’t cooperate, “Gckk!”

“Remain calm,” someone says in his ear, the voice high but steady. “It’s—sir, you need to breathe and stay calm. I’m Alicia, I’m with the ECDC. We need to make sure you’re not still infested, then we’ll get the paramedics here.”

Jon, who had already been trying very hard to breathe and stay calm, chokes on dry air and pain and flails. He struggles against the arms, but they might as well be bars of iron. His brain is a blaring loop of they’re in him, they’d eaten through him, and oh god Tim was with him when it happened they got him too and it hurts it hurts it hurts—

“Sir, can you understand me? You need to—“

“T’m,” he slurs, wildly trying to catch Alicia’s eye through her mask. “W’s T’m? W’s w’th m’.”

Alicia miraculously seems to understand.

“Your colleague is fine, he wasn’t—he’s still going through quarantine procedures, he’s alright. He’s in the other tent. The only casualties were—was Jane Prentiss.”

Jon relaxes slightly, exhaling through his nose and moving his eyes around the tent. Lights are flashing through the thin walls, red and blue and white, and there’s a faint murmur of a crowd outside beneath the singular siren. Alicia moves around him, unwrapping gauze and trading his ratty I-am-a-dead-person sheet for a shock blanket.

“You really give us a start there,” she says with a quiet laugh. She shines a light between his eyes, peering at him. “Paramedics gave you to us marked as a DOA for cremation, don’t know what kind of operation they’re running, if they don’t even know how to check for a pulse properly—”

Jon unrelaxes. Oh.

Oh, oh, oh, oh. Right. Dead person sheet, plus DOA claim, plus cremation equals—

He’s dead! That’s it. He’s dead. He was dead. Dead, dead, dead and dead, and now he’s not. The worms ate him, and he and Tim had been screaming, and trapped, and oh god I knew this was coming but really did not think it was going to be like this and then things got blurry and then they got dark and then. And then.

Well.

The Archives did kill him, then.

Jon closes his eyes. His mouth is dry, and tastes like— like things he doesn’t even want to think about.

He tries not to wonder about things burrowing so deep into him that he stopped working. Holes his skin, still leaking blood. Holes in every organ. Dug straight to the core of him. Gnawing, squirming, consuming him until he died. He hurts.

They’d missed, buried in his chest, a very tightly strung something. It’s old and taut, and it pulls even tighter as phantom worms chew through him.

The paramedics arrive. Jon stares up at the fabric ceiling and lets himself drift.

He exits the quarantine tent an indeterminable amount of time later.

Alicia had kindly offered to walk him to a taxi, or less kindly and more insistently to the ambulance to take him straight to the hospital. He politely declines both and instead staggers from the tent like a dignified drunk. She follows him patiently, until he finds himself stopped for no apparent reason. It’s not the pain, he actually can’t feel...well, much of anything, anymore. Which is good! Great actually, he’s pretty sure he could take on Jane Prentiss with a single fire extinguisher.

He closes his eyes for a half second and finds himself sitting on the ground. Alicia is crouched next to him.

“Sir, look—”

“Jon,” he corrects. Sir makes him sound like someone’s boss, and he is neither no-nonsense nor confident right now. “Help me up?”

“I don’t think—”

“Please.”

Alicia purses her lips, but helps him to his feet. He wobbles a normal amount.

“Jon, then, I’m pretty sure I legally can’t let you wander around the site right now. Is there someone I can leave you with, make sure you get home? If not I’ll have to grab one of those useless bloody paramedics.”

“Yes, I…” The parking lot swims with lights, and Jon casts an eye over the thinning crowd. Tim will...probably almost as bad as him, if he lived. He’s got no clue if Sasha even stayed, she’s not really...the type to waste time somewhere she’s not involved? Right? Yeah, that sounds like Sasha. Which leaves—

“Martin,” Jon says, staring at the crowd. “Ma—my assistant, he’s tall, got very—very nice eyes, they’re very—just, just extremely nice eyes. I used to think he wanted to kill me, but now I’m fairly sure he just likes spiders. He’s, he’s very bad at formatting?”

“Right,” Alicia nods, hustling him back to the side of the tent. “Forgot you’re on drugs. Anything else? Formatting style and ‘nice eyes’ aren’t extremely helpful. ”

“That’s not what— you misheard me,” Jon says starchly, pulling free from her grip. “I — I said brown. I said very brown eyes. Just, just, extremely brown eyes. And it's not a style, it's an insult to information gathering.”

“Right s—Jon. Well, stay here, I’ll go see if he’s in the crowd. Just don’t go anywhere, alright?”

Alicia heads towards the crowd. Jon watches her curiously for about three seconds, then staggers in the opposite direction and around the corner of the tent.

He needs to….he needs to know how it happened. Cause of death, redux. Autopsy report. A second opinion. Take two. What’s Tim always saying? Something boogaloo. He needs to know, he needs—Jon halts.

Martin is standing around the corner of the tent, not a scratch on him. Oh, that’s. That’s good.

Weird for him to be hanging out there, but Jon is in no position to judge lurkers. He’s about to head past him, find Tim and maybe compare the quality of their bandaging, when Martin’s voice cracks.

“Please, I just—I just want to see him,” Martin is pleading with the gray-faced ECDC agent Jon is reasonably sure was the one who’d rudely stood gawking at him as he’s choked up nothing. His mask is pulled down, and there’s a cigarette clutched between shaking fingers.

“You don’t get it, man, he’s not—look, I checked his pulse, I did, but he was—he was—this isn’t my fucking job, I don’t—it was fucked, man, he was like a fucking— nobody could have survived that, he was like bloody roadkill—“

“I don’t care!” Martin says, and it’s the closest Jon’s ever heard him come to a shout, as miserable as it sounds. “I don’t care how it looks, it’s— I left him, I just want to, to, see—say, say good—"

To Jon’s horror, Martin’s hand flies to his mouth, cutting off a sob. Jon taps his hands together, turning unsteadily between Martin and the rest of the parking lot.

He needs to know what happened, but there’s no possible way to have an account of all of the events that transpired—

Oh, yeah. Duh. Jon glances around on the ground, as if there will be a recorder sitting on the pavement. They have been appearing at random, something Jon attributes to the general cursedness of the Institute, but nothing materializes.

He’ll have to go back into the Archive. But first, Martin is still clearly becoming increasingly upset. Right in front of him. Jon should...do something about that.

“Look, man, the paramedics are in there now,” Grant the unprofessional ECDC worker is mumbling. “Wait here or whatever, I’m done with this.”

Martin stills at that, scrubbing his face as Grant turns, spots Jon, and immediately spins on his heel to walk in the other direction. Rude and unprofessional.

“Pa— paramedics?” Martin is saying weakly. He steps in the direction Grant bolted, shoulders sagging. “Wait, but he’s—I saw—”

Jon steels himself. Being a good boss is all about confidence, or something. Maybe it was organization. He forgets. But if he can confidently comfort a coworker after a nightmare woman attacked their place of work and ate through him with her nightmare worms, he can do anything.

“Martin, there you are,” he says, striding up to him. Hobbling, whatever. He tries to make it a casual hobble. As if they hadn’t both just escaped—in a flexible sense of the word—from a very wormy fate. “I think we all need to make statem—”

“Jon?!”

Jon has about two seconds to register the veritable rainbow of emotions that cross Martin’s face before he is being smothered to death by a pastel cableknit jumper.

“Mmph,” Jon says, tapping on Martin’s arms frantically. He’d really rather not asphyxiate so soon after being eaten by worms, no matter how warm and soft Martin is. Which. Very weird thought, don’t think that, you’re his boss. No nonsense, that counts as nonsense.

Martin does release him, holding him at arm's length but not letting go.

“Jon, I thought—” Jon looks up in alarm at the tears in Martin’s eyes. Which are still brown, and very warm at the moment. “Jon, I thought you were dead, you—they, they brought your body out, they said—”

“They, um.” He gently extricates himself from Martin’s grip, wincing as some of his bandages tug. He is not excited for when the painkillers wear off. Be great if the not dying thing came with a not-feeling-pain thing. He could be a damned superhero, if he didn’t think he was going to throw up and maybe start screaming the moment he was alone. “They didn’t check my pulse. Apparently? I don’t know, I was very dead. I mean, dead asleep, I—I was unconscious.”

“They didn’t check your pulse?!” There might be steam coming from Martin’s ears, but it’s a warm night, and his vision is already blurry, so Jon can’t tell. All the same, Martin glares over at the paramedics gathered in a tight little circle outside the other quarantine tent with startling ferocity.

“I— I think it was a, a, an issue with the...worms,” Jon says quickly. His words keep coming out weirdly, like his lips are numb. His mouth is still horribly dry. “Suppose they couldn’t quite tell the um.” he shudders. Of all the lies he had to go with, it had to be the most revolting. “The movement. Beneath my…. skin, um, anyway I—how did you get out?”

“Oh god,” Martin says, looking very much like he wants to grab Jon again. Jon edges away a little, crushing the thought that it might be sort of nice. He doesn’t get many hugs. He’s not insecure about it.

“What? ‘Oh god’ what?” Jon turns his head. All he sees is Elias, staring at them with an unreadable expression. There are two cops in front of him, and both of them turn to look at Jon as well. “Why are the police here?” He scoffs. “You can’t arrest a worm, that’s ridiculous. ”

“Um—what?” Martin squints at him. “Jon are you—did they give you painkillers, or something?”

“Mmm. Alicia did say I was on drugs. But I don’t see how that’s relevant. ” He meets Martin’s eyes, prompting. “Why are the police here?”

“Right, um, that’s—maybe we can talk about this later, when you’re not—um. I, I can help you get home, if you like, you really should be getting some rest—”

“Martin,” Jon says, frowning. A sliver of solidity seems to pierce the haze around him, the parking lot stilling. “Tell me. I want to know.”

“It’s—it’s Gertrude,” Martin says finally. He seems caught by the officers’ gaze as well. “I, I, found her.”

“Oh.” Jon considers this, watching Elias walk towards them with some distaste. “Did she commit a crime? I can’t say I’m very attached to the job right now if she wants it back, I don’t really want to—”

“She’s dead, Jon,” Martin says. “Somebody killed her.”

The cold and tight-strung something inside of Jon very quietly snaps.

“Oh,” says Jon. He blinks. Sways. Looks at Martin. “I need your statement.”

Jon can admit to himself, he isn’t doing...great.

He’s not like, dying, not actively, even if….even if sometimes it feels like it. Feels like the walls are the only protection from him and the hungry, murderous world, feels like stepping outside is hanging a sword above his head and entering the Archives is giving it permission to fall whenever it feels like it.

He catches Tim watching him limp up the stairs, an odd look on his face.

He’s noticing your weaknesses.

He sees Martin pour out a cup of tea and immediately make another one, face pinched.

He’s deciding whether to poison you.

Elias’ stare is like a weight when he’s in the Archives, his smile— always a little thank-you-for-signing-over-your-life-to-me— even more menacing than usual.

HE’S GOING TO KILL YOU!

Jon locks his office door these days.

Well, at least Sasha hasn’t been threatening or different in any way. He’s already gone through her desk anyway, and the most concerning thing he’d found was a skinned furby, which she’d told him was a superstition leftover from Artefact Storage. That seems normal and right.

Which is why he asks Sasha to be the one to wait with Helen Richardson while he gets set up, and has Sasha be the one to lead Helen into his office.

Helen is scared. Helen knows something is coming for her. Helen is...just like him.

And then, very quickly, Helen is gone.

“Bring her back here!” Jon says, rounding his desk to— to what? Punch the towering twist of a creature in front of him? Jon isn’t good in fights, he’d always been too scared of being pushed once and dying immediately, and that’s not quite a joke. He steps forward once, hoping that whatever he ends up doing is effective, just get her back —

He needn’t have worried. There’s a mosaic of color and bending limbs, and then a sharp stab somewhere south of his sternum.

“You—” Jon stumbles back, watching Michael examine his bloodied hand. “You stabbed me!”

“Very observant, Archivist,” Michael laughs. “Perhaps you will play a part in the struggle. If you don’t die first.”

“You—you stabbed me!” he says again, staring down at his jumper in disbelief. The stain is rapidly growing, quicker than he thought could happen in real life. “What the hell? Who are you?”

Michael laughs as he coughs, reaching for his desk.

“Not a who, Archivist. A what. A who requires a degree of identity—”

“Shut up! Stop talking in riddles! You stabbed me!” Jon grabs a spare sweater from his chair, incensed as he presses it against his stomach. His chest is strung tight as a drum, terror climbing up his ribcage like the rungs of a ladder, and this is it this is it he’s going to die here —

Things blur. Michael’s laughter blends into the squeak of a door. He’s…sitting? Laying down? Something’s wrong in his abdomen, something is very not right there.

Jon has a moment of gripping, unavoidable understanding. Oh fuck. Oh god. Oh god, he's going to—

Jon dies.

And then—

Oh fantastic. The thought is hazy, flickering up in a mind brought back to life. Jon blinks, staring up at his ceiling speckled in yellow light. I’m not dead.

There’s a rattle at his door.

Jon throws himself upwards, the room spinning dark for a moment as he scrabbles along his desk. The lock is being scratched, a voice outside mocking, muffled enough he can’t make it out, but someone is trying to get in.

He just manages to grab up something too blurry to see before the door cracks open.

“Jon? It’s time to go, everyone’s already—well everyone but you, you really should— oh-my-god-what-the-hell.”

“Stay out,” Jon pants, brandishing a tape recorder. “Stay, stay—”

“Jon, is that— oh my god— you’re, you’re bleeding!” Martin says, and there’s something awful and undefinable in his expression, something Jon doesn’t know—

“Stay away from me!” he shouts, panicked. Martin drops his bag at his side, hands flying upwards.

“Jon! Jon? It’s okay, ha, it’s— it’s Martin? Just Martin, you—”

“Don’t come any closer,” he pants, reaching out blindly for the desk. He just needs—just needs to get his balance, drink some water, catch his breath, and then—

He misses the desk. The office flips.

There’s something that happens in the intervening seconds—he doesn’t die, as far as he can tell, but from the amount of shouting you’d think somebody did. Was that him? No, he hasn’t shouted since the first day, a good boss should be—

“Jon? Jon? Jon, if one of the statements came to life and attacked you, you have to tell me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jon slurs, trying to orient his parched and swirling brain. Martin is standing over him. Martin is standing over him, and oh, that’s really the perfect position to drop something heavy on his head, or kick in his ribs or—

Jon sits bolt upright and nearly bangs his head on the desk. He glares up at Martin.

“Get out.”

“Jon, it’s—please, I think you’re really hurt—”

“Get out—”

“Jon, it’s—it’s Martin, you—you know it’s me right?”

“Of course I know it’s you!” Jon tries to shout, but it comes out strangled and pitchy. “Of course, that’s—that’s—”

That’s kind of the worst part. Martin with his lovely— with his brown eyes, and his weirdly good tea, and his sheepish smile as he offers lunch, and his stupid stubborn affection for something so horrid as spiders. Martin with a knife in his hands, waiting for Jon to believe all that and drop his guard completely.

Michael was one thing, Michael was—oh god, Michael killed him. Michael had come into his office, like it was nothing, and killed him, and said—

Do you even know they’re lying to you?

Jon puts his face in his hands. He can’t catch his breath.

“I’m—I’m going to die,” Jon wheezes into his palms. They’re wet, and he presses them closer to his face, breathing in the salt as if that alone will remedy the desert in his throat. “I’m going to be dead.”

“Look, Jon, I—I’m really trying not to freak out! But that’s, that’s—can, can I help you up? Let’s get you to the chair, and I, I can—”

Martin somehow manages to stand him up and guides him to the chair— it’s a miracle his legs work, though he can’t really feel them even as they bend to let him sit.

“Just— just don’t move,” Martin says, pausing several times on his way to the door as if to make sure Jon isn’t moving. “Just— breathe, okay, breathe, I’ll just—stay here, I’ll be right back—”

The door swings shut noiselessly. Jon tips his head to the ceiling and tries to do what Martin said. Breathe. Not move.

Stay here. A bit funny, that one. Jon isn’t supposed to be here, but here he is.

That’s three, then. Two more than one, one more than two. He’s died three more times than any regular living person. He should get a plaque! A badge. A fucking certificate.

“Jon?” Martin’s voice is right in front of him, and Jon controls himself enough not to startle backwards. He gulps, watching Martin reach closer with he’s going to kill you here and now he’s going to— “Here, press down, I—christ Jon, that’s—that is a lot of blood.”

“It’s...fine, Martin,” Jon says hoarsely, watching Martin’s hands. They hover, then retreat— empty, but he could have something in his back pocket, or reach for the stapler on the desk, or— “I’ll live, you should—please leave.”

Martin looks incensed. Murder plot foiled, probably.

“Um. No? Sorry Jon, I’m not going to just—look, I don’t know how deep that is, and you don’t seem—I’m not just leaving you to bleed internally and die here!”

“No?” Jon challenges, trying to rise, failing miserably, and hopefully covering it up with an awkward straightening in his chair. Martin looks unconvinced. “No? What, you’d rather do it differently?”

“Wha—Jon, what?”

“At least this way you have some deniability,” Jon spits. He can’t—the thing in his chest, the frayed and re-tied and thinning rope keeping him together, it’s shaking with the strain. He’s going to die. He did die. “Frankly I’d rather you had the guts to do it yourself.”

“What?”

“You heard me!”

There’s a long, drawn silence. Jon slumps in the chair, a bit put out at Martin’s expression. There’s no rage or scheming, just...

“Do you think...Jon. Jon, I, I’m not going to kill you.”

He says it sort of like a question, high and strained.

“If you’re going to do it,” says Jon. His voice is weaker than he’d like, but there’s nothing for it. He’s so tired. He’s so thirsty. “Please just…I’m tired of waiting. Please.”

He presses his eyes shut. He’s ready. He’s ready, and he’s willing, and goddammit, he knew this place was going to kill him, but he didn’t think it would happen twice, let alone three times. Maybe this is what Elias had planned all along.

“Jon.”

Jon doesn’t respond. He’s going to die. What’s there to say?

“Jon you—you’re hurt, and, and obviously exhausted, I—” Martin makes a small whistling noise, like he’s breathing out. “I don’t know how—” his voice breaks. How strange. “—to make you believe I would never, ever hurt you, let alone murder you in your office.”

What about in the tunnels? In the canteen? In the breakroom? Jon doesn’t say these things. His mouth is too dry, and they...hurt to think. He hurts.

Martin continues.

“But that’s like, an unhealthy amount of blood? I mean no amount is healthy, I’m not— what I mean is,” Martin clears his throat. “I’m going to call an ambulance, and I’m pretty sure if I let you walk up the stairs alone you’re just going to try to go home and get blood everywhere, so... please Jon, just. Trust me?”

Jon swallows. His eyelids sting.

“I can’t, Martin.”

Martin takes a loud, slow breath.

“O-okay, that’s, that’s fine, I won’t—I can’t make you. But would….can you trust me just for now, then? Just for, for a few minutes.”

Jon finally peels his eyes open. Martin is staring at him.

“I. Okay.” He’s going to die. Martin’s not going to kill him. Not right now, at least. That...makes more sense. Not right now. “Just for few minutes.”

Jon’s stomach screams at him as he stands—he still doesn’t really know how it works, how much he’s healed when he comes back. He gets the impression he would die again if he didn’t do a thing, but whatever is healed is...enough to keep him from being dead.

Jon doesn’t particularly like to think about it too deeply.

He lets Martin wind an arm around his shoulder— he won’t kill you, not right now — and together they make their way out of the Archive. Martin grumbles all the way up about Elias being bloody ableist I swear this whole building and going to petition for an elevator after this and for a second there Jon gets the overwhelming impression Martin’s about to literally scoop him up.

He doesn’t, though. More importantly, Martin doesn’t kill him. And Jon doesn’t die.

Just for now.

“Will you tell me what happened, at least?” Martin hasn't quite let go of him, which is probably a good thing, because Jon is about 80% he’s about to keel over and die one more time if he does. Martin gestures with his free hand, voice shaking. “What—how it happened?”

Jon sighs, squeezing his eyes shut for a long time. He can hear the siren. He sighs, and looks Martin directly and unwaveringly in the eye.

“It was an accident,” he says steadily. “I was—it was a breadknife.”

“Jon—”

“I was,” Jon says. There’s a lump in his throat. “Cutting bread.”

Martin looks at him for seven seconds. Jon counts. His eyes are their forever brown, and very strangely glossy just now.

“Right.” Martin looks away, swiping a hand over his face. His tone is watery and defeated. “Right, right, right.”

Sasha is...dead. Sasha has been dead. Sasha died, and stayed dead, and Jon sort of wants to curl up in his office with the door locked and freak out over it for a day or two. Only locked doors don’t particularly mean anything with Michael lurking around, so.

So, instead, Jon does the next logical thing.

“Do you want this in a bag?”

Jon stares blankly at the cashier. She wobbles the axe at him, raising bleached eyebrows.

“Sir? I said—”

“No, I’ll just…” he holds out a hand and she very slowly hands him the axe, eyebrows reaching her hairline. “Thanks. Um. Have a nice day.”

He paces out of the store, clutching the axe in both hands and considering how to get it where he needs to be. He could just...pretend it’s haunted. He’s seen people walk into the Institute carrying literal cursed objects before, including but not limited to a box of dirt that kept vomiting up body parts, a bottomless mug that forced people to drink until they drowned themselves, and a glass eye of indeterminable nature that Elias now keeps in his office, stuck in the eye socket of one of the skull. Not to mention the Leitners.

Sasha—was that Sasha?— had once plunked a pen made of human teeth on his desk just to see what he’d do. He’d yelled in alarm, of course, and she’d laughed and told him it was to make up for the ones she’d stolen.

Jon stands in front of the darkened Institute, axe in hand. He’s faintly aware he’s crying.

Sasha should be here to take the axe to the table herself. She’d relish in it, no doubt, probably only take one or two swings to break the thing apart. Or, he thinks she would. He can’t be sure anymore.

It doesn’t matter, though. Sasha isn’t here anymore. Jon is. He heads inside.

“You need,” Michael warbles, face contorted in that awful grin. “A door!”

Actually, Jon needs to have not been an idiot. He needs to have thought this through for more than two seconds, needs Sasha to not have died, needs to have remembered that oh, right, Jonathan, these things are dangerous and will kill you! Clue that in, you can’t go about fixing them like some sort of axe-wielding action film star—

“Shit,” he says once, hugging the axe. The door to Artefact Storage is closed now, but it’s going to open, and he’s going to die— “Shit!”

He trips through Michael’s door, falling flat on his face as it slams shut behind him. The world is dark.

He thinks he might be...dead. He’s not sure how to tell these things, he’s only died three times before. Not nearly enough time to be an expert.

“Good luck, Archivist,” a grinning voice spins towards him. A door creaks shut.

So not dead, then. Just almost dead. Fantastic.

He scrambles to his feet, squinting through the dark. He can still salvage this. Probably. Just avoid Sasha the monster in the cursed tunnels beneath the cursed Institute long enough to call...somebody. That’s a plan, right? He just needs to...figure out who to call. Section 31? Elias? Gerard Keay?

Two bad options and one very dead one.

There’s an echo from the dark, oddly musical. Jon going to die. Tonight. Soon. Post-haste.

He allows himself a single, indulgent “ fuck!”. Then, with very little else to do, he starts running.

Jon doesn’t die!

Jurgen Leitner….does.

It’s like some fucked up cosmic joke—one Jon considers to be in extremely poor taste. Leitner had started this, that cardboard book, that hideous door that Jon went through and came out wrong. Leitner is the reason Jon is here at all. And now he’s dead. And Jon is just...still here.

Jon doesn’t die from looking upon a corpse, no. But he stares at the blood pouring down the chair, the dark little pools at its legs, a weird, numb part of him expects him to wake back up.

He doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t, he’s dead, that’s ridiculous.

“I need to, um…” Jon points at the door awkwardly. The corpse doesn’t seem to care. “I need to...I’ll just…”

Jon stumbles out of the Archives, very much alive. He gets the impression the condition won’t last.

“Statement of Jonathan Sims, Head Ar—former Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute, London, regarding his….death. Well. Deaths. Statement recorded by subject February 18th, 2017.

Statement begins.

I knew about death younger than most, I think. My father died when I was two, and my mother a few years later. I went to both their funerals, even if I only remember my mother’s very faintly. An impression of sitting somewhere uncomfortable, of knowing something heavy and dark and sad. I learned death was a place people wouldn’t come back from, no matter how unhappy it made those they had left behind. I learned it was, above all, quite permanent.

It was a Leitner, of course, that first killed me— A Guest for Mr. Spider. I won’t tell you what its pages contained. Imagine what you think a Leitner’s children’s book full of spiders would look like, and that’s...that’s pretty much the shape of it. The point isn’t what was inside the book. The point is, that the moment I picked it up I knew I was going to die.

I can’t explain it, not really. I kept reading, kept turning page after entrancing page, the story pulling me along the sidewalk. Pulling something inside me, like a rope, or a wire was being strung between my sternum in my spine and cranked tight with every step. I was tied to the book, and the book was tied to me, and it was pulling me somewhere that would pull me apart. I simply...knew, that it was going to kill me.

And that simple fact filled me with more terror than I’d ever felt before in my life.

It was only when a bully managed to knock the book from my hand, that some of the strings loosened, and the world fell into place. It was evening, much later than it had been when I started the book. Birds were singing from the park trees, louder than I’d ever heard before, and the man—boy really—who might have been my savior was towering over me. For a moment I was sure he was about to hit me. But then he just crouched, picked up the book to its open page, and walked away.

I followed him— of course I followed him, I was still terrified and I didn’t know what else to do. We walked through the park, the darkening alleys, until we reached a door. A door I’m not very likely to forget, which is good, in a way. It seems like there are a lot of doors in my life right now. Best not to pick the wrong one.

I thought I could do something, as he raised his fist to knock. I don’t know what. Stop it, maybe? Keep him from knocking?

But really, in the end, all I did was stand too close.

I won’t...describe the pain. It wasn’t anything I’d experienced before, and hopefully something I won’t experience again. I mean, it’s very statistically unlikely for a person to be eaten by a spider more than once in their life, but I think it’s also statistically unlikely for it to happen at all. The pain wasn’t the worst part. I mean, it wasn’t fun, obviously, but the memory of the feeling’s faded. What hasn’t faded was the horror that gripped me as the door swung open. Knowing that we had arrived at the destination of those strings pulled us towards, seeing those impossibly long, spindly legs reaching out, those dark, glittering eyes peering from the dark…

Knowing that I was about to simply...not be there.

I died...I died quite afraid.

And then….

And then I woke up.

Outside, in the same street outside the door. It was night, still, the lampposts lit up yellow and the birds still singing despite the dark. Everything was sudden and unnatural and surreal. I was hysterical, of course, and ran all the way home. My grandmother thought it was nonsense—who wouldn’t? I didn’t have any proof, I had no clue where the book went, and there was no trace that the boy who had died with me even existed. In any case, people don’t just come back to life, that’s ridiculous. It’s, ha, it’s absurd. It’s not right.

I spent many, many years following that thinking I was about to die. Looking over my shoulder for Mr. Spider. For a time I even managed to convince myself I had dreamt it up, or simply been knocked unconscious. Of course, I knew the truth, deep down. I couldn’t deny it. I still felt the fear, like a physical thing living inside of me.

Then...Jane Prentiss attacked the Institute. I’d been scared long before she arrived, but actually seeing her, actually knowing she was there to kill me. Me, personally. To my knowledge I’ve never been excessively rude or cruel to any worms, so I could only imagine her goal was of a more...direct nature, towards the role of Archivist. Of course, I never got to ask her before the worms ate through me, before I felt that certainty again—I was going. To. Die.

I was just as scared as the first time. More, maybe, since I had more of a conceptualization of death, and the certainty that this time, it would be permanent.

Anyone listening to this will know it, ah, obviously wasn’t. I woke up again, more or less intact, and with the chilling knowledge that I could die — just not stay dead. I couldn’t really fathom what this might mean, and my...precarious mental state in the months following I attribute to a combination of being quite preoccupied with the um, concept of death as a whole, exacerbated by the presence of the being posing as Sasha.

I rather thought I was going to die at any moment, from any hand, and it seemed...improbable I would return a third time. Of course, once Helen Richardson came to the Institute, Michael solved that question, both to my relief and my growing horror. How many times would I die? How many times would it take for me to stay dead?

It is…unclear to me, whether my next death will be my last. People aren’t supposed to come back like that, how was I— how am I supposed to assume the next go around won’t be the final one? I’m not supposed to be here, I know that. But I am, and I was, and even after Michael, I was again. I am again.

All of this to say, I...don’t know why I’m here. Still. I feel as though whatever did this to me— Mr. Spider, is my guess—either made a mistake, or otherwise intended it as some horrific curse. I still age, thank goodness, I don’t seem to be completely everlasting. Could never stand that horrid book. What was it? The one with that insufferable family who went about kidnapping children to make them immortal? Despicable, if you ask me.

I’m not, though. Immortal. It’s not not dying, it’s...not being dead. I die. I just don’t stay dead. And I don’t know what scares me more—the thought that next time I won’t come back to life or...or the thought that I will, just to live in terror of the next one. I’m just—I’m so tired of being scared of it, of which one it will be. I’m tired of the fear.

But I don’t think that’s going to go away, anytime soon.

End recording.”

The tape recorder clicks off before he can reach for it. Jon sighs in resignation, leaning back on the couch. That’s...that’s about right.

He stares at the ceiling for probably long enough that someone would be concerned. Thankfully Georgie’s asleep, now, and won’t catch him doing it. Cars race on the street outside, throwing bizarre little patterns across the corners.

“Right.” He creaks upwards on joints that are still resenting him for running around with a heavy pipe. Stares at the wall for several more minutes, for good measure. “Right, right, right.”

It’s not until he’s filling a glass of water from the tap, that something brushes his leg and he glances to see two huge eyes peering up at him.

“What large eyes you have,” Jon coos, closing the tap and leaning against the counter. “Are you like me? Do you belong to the Eye?”

The Admiral does a little circle of enthusiasm, and Jon reaches down to pick him up.

“No,” he says, sighing as he juggles the glass and the cat. “No, you probably belong to whatever evil god is responsible for shedding, or canned tuna.”

The Admiral makes a noise of negation, and Jon sighs again as he carries him back to the couch. The Admiral curls up on the pillow next to him, and Jon scratches him idly as he sips his water and resumes staring at the wall.

And it is a wall. A wall, not a door, and he’s in a flat, not in a park, and it’s cars making that noise outside, not birds trilling into the night. Even though it feels like he can hear them, they’re outside the window, they’re perched on top of the house—

He sort of wishes he hadn’t recorded that statement.

“Admiral?” he asks absently. “Do you hear them?”

The Admiral just peers up at him with inquisitive eyes. He butts his head against Jon’s knee, and Jon smiles weakly.

“Of course you don’t.” He rubs the Admiral’s silky ears between his fingers, before planting a kiss on his little forehead. “Cheer up, Admiral. You’re going to live forever.”

The burn doesn’t kill him. The pain doesn’t kill him. Not even the car that almost hits him as he staggers back to Georgie’s kills him.

The fever does kill him.

What’s worse, he watches it kill him. It does so in degrees, which he might find kind of funny— ha-ha, degrees, hot, burning alive, yes, hilarious — if he weren’t so busy tamping down on his burgeoning panic.

Jon watches the deathfire burn through him, watches the end approach in its hazy abstractness, and knows he will be gone.

He’d woken up after Mr. Spider. He’d woken up after Jane. He’d even woken up after Michael. Three might be a pattern, but Jon is sort of a statistical anomaly by his own measure—AB negative blood, arching fingerprints, preauricular sinuses—and isn’t willing to hedge his bets.

Die, die, die, Archivist, the fire whispers as he lays awake on Georgie’s sofa. The ceiling is a swirling mass of sparks. Burn and die, die and burn. You shook the hand, you made the deal. You let the fire in, now burn.

Please shut up , he thinks back at it, but his thoughts are so scrambled that halfway through shut, his eyes catch on the ceiling fan and he becomes mesmerized at the way it spins through the glittering sparks.

Die, Archivist the fire whispers. Jon keeps his breathing steady, tears squeezing from his eyes.

I don’t want to, he tries to say. His lips are charred. They don’t move.

A gust of flame passes through him, up his arm, spreading through his body like— ha—like a wildfire.

He wakes the next morning to Georgie’s frantic yelling. Something something his hand, something something hospital, something something Jonathan Sims I swear to god if you stuck your hand in a fryer like that one shitty horror movie—

He just sort of stares up at her in wonderment. Fantastic. She glowers back, the gap in her teeth hidden behind pursed lips. I’m not dead.

“I think,” he croaks eventually. He levers himself up, blinking past sparks. It’s a little hard to think past the pain and the dryness in his throat, and he hopes what he says ends up making sense. It makes sense to him. “I should talk to a medical professional.”

“No way, really?”

He taps his unburnt hand on his leg.

“Or maybe a religious one? I’m not sure.”

“How about a therapist?” Georgie’s brows twitch perilously. “Jon, it’s—I’m not judging you, or anything like that, I just...I need you to tell me honestly. You didn’t do that to yourself.”

It takes three seconds for Jon to parse the words, then the meaning, then the nuance of him shaking Jude’s hand as having done something to himself? Does that count? He had honestly thought she was just being petty or—

“Oh! Oh, no.” He shakes his head vigorously and she relaxes slightly. She knows he can’t lie for shit, which is going to work to his advantage literally only now.

Case in point:

“Then what the hell happened? You were fine yesterday!”

“Um.” Jon squints at her for twelve straight seconds. Her eyebrow twitches. “I burned it. I was s—smoking. ”

“You,” Georgie pinches the bridge of her nose. “Are so full of shit. Look, fine, keep your secrets or whatever. But if you show up looking like Two-Face I am using it as an excuse to steal your weird haunted lighter.”

“My—” Jon’s gaze wanders to the Admiral, skulking around the bottom of the sofa. He blinks. “Sorry, what?’

Georgie sighs.

“Yep! Seems about right.”

She’s still frowning, but now it’s at his hand. He’d be frowning if he looked at it too. Jon doesn’t think flesh is supposed to...bubble like that. “You’re definitely right about the medical professional, jesus. Tell me you at least ransacked my painkillers.”

“No, I don’t— I mean yes, I took something, but the medical professional, I mean, I can take care of this myself!” He shifts his hand slightly and yelps as fire races up his arm. “It’s more I’ve been experiencing a...recurring health concern.”

“What, Being Frustratingly Vague Syndrome?” Georgie shrugs, scratching the Admiral as he leaps up onto the edge of the sofa. “Pretty sure that’s incurable, but it’s admirable you want to get help.”

“No, no, that’s a lost battle,” Jon says anxiously, eyeing the Admiral. “I just...I’m going to talk to somebody today about—about the sky? I think? And then I think...I don’t know, do churches do walk-ins? Or do you know any rabbis?”

Georgie looks at him for a long time.

“How about,” she says, scooping up the Admiral and depositing him on Jon’s lap. “You let the Admiral take a nap on you, eat like, one chip minimum, wrap that awful burn, and then you can go find a mosque or a monastery or whatever your BFV Syndrome-infected heart desires.”

“That sounds...like a good plan,” Jon admits.

“It sure does. Barker plans tend to be,” Georgie says airily. “Now, you want more painkillers? Tea?”

“Just water, thanks, I...thank you, Georgie. Sorry.”

“For what?”

He can’t really say sorry for dying on your sofa, so he just smiles as the Admiral meows plaintively.

“For being the favored parent.”

Georgie flips him off as she heads into the kitchen.

“Right.” Jon tells the cat on his chest. “I will do...most of that. Probably And then I’ll...I’ll go find Mike,” Jon sighs, sinking back into the sofa and petting the Admiral with his non-bubbly hand. “Admiral, I really, really hope he doesn’t kill me.”

So, Mike kills Jon.

To be fair, he warned him he was going to kill him, Jon is just incapable of shutting his mouth when he’s supposed to. Like when Mike says “Take my mercy, and leave. Ask another question, and you’re done,” and Jon, pain-dazed, breathless, very much not listening, says “But I just need to know about—” and Mike rolls his eyes as all the air leaves Jon’s lungs once more.

This time he hits the ground. It’s quick, at least.

When he comes to, Detective Tonner is standing over him. Oh fantastic, I’m not dead, he barely has time to think before she glares at him. Her eyes are sharp and bright, and very intimidating just now.

“Dai— ’tective?” he says dizzily. Every square centimeter of him feels shattered. “Wassgon?”

“Get up.”

He conks his head back against the ground. Five more minutes. Five more minutes, and maybe a sip of water, or maybe that tea Mike had offered. The ceiling is making strange airy circles above him. It’s sort of beautiful. Daisy is moving around the room, clearly not caring.

“Wh’rd Mike—” he turns his head to the side just enough to see the crumpled body next to him. Blood is pooling beneath Mike’s skull, his eyelids twitching frenetically. Jon’s chest goes tight and frozen. “Oh. Um.”

If he didn’t have an incentive to get up before, he definitely doesn’t have one now. Standing seems like a great way to be in reach of Daisy beating him over the head with something.

He tilts his gaze a bit upwards, and catches sight of her boots approaching. They kick away fragments of plastic, thready bits of tape and recorder scattered across the floor. He sits up very quickly. Kicking to death somehow seems...worse? He’s not sure why.

He doesn’t have time to dwell on it. Or dwell at all, really. Daisy yanks him by the collar and shoves him through the door.

“You brought the knife,” Daisy says. “So we’ll go through the voicebox.”

Her teeth glint in the dark. She’s smiling. She’s smiling and it doesn’t fucking matter that Jon’s died before, because something about this woman grinning sharply from the dark gives him the unerring impression that if she kills him, she’ll kill him dead. No more fun little oh fantastic I’m not dead realizations or awkward but pleasing I thought you’d died! or, in general, being alive.

The thought makes the world tilt. No more living. No more living. Birds are screaming from the dark trees, and Jon is about to be dead.

“Please,” he gasps in sudden terror. Something in him has broken. Come loose. Uncoiled in its entirety, and is welling up inside of him, and cannot be fixed. “Please, I don’t—”

The blade whips across his throat. For the briefest instant, Jon breathes in air, cold and singing. Then he chokes once. Twice. His body is not his body, it’s just something dragging him down.

His knees hit the earth. There is blood, and there is blood, and there is blood, and there is nothing.

Jon wakes up. For a single beautiful moment he gets to think oh fantastic I’m not dead. Then why are all the lights off. Then why is there dirt in my mouth.

Then:

“Ohhh, no,” he gasps. Stupid, because all that does is give him a mouthful of dirt. “No, no-no-no, oh please, oh god oh fuck, not fucking this.”

Nobody hears him. Well, nobody except maybe poor dead Mike Crew, encased next to him in the dirt. Jon can’t see him, but he knows he’s there. Knows he’s quite deader than Jon, and that Jon, himself, is about to be dead again. Already his breath is shortening, his mouth filled with soil he can’t spit out.

Couldn’t Daisy have used a coffin for her violent, extra-judicial killings?

He lets himself cry for a bit, as much of a waste that is down here. The earth isn’t as densely packed as it could be, and he imagines sucking in the air through the cracks in the soil. It doesn’t last.

Jon doesn’t know how many times he dies there. He stops counting after six. He stops thinking straight sometime after that, the world condensed into the weight above him, burning of his lungs, the blood-taste of earth scraping down his throat with every non-inhale. He cries a few more times, imagining the soil drinking up his tears, imagining the open air above standing peaceful and unknowing.

It kills him and it kills him and it kills him. Jon dies and dies and dies.

He dies and he dies again, and dying isn’t even the bad part. The bad part is even as his mind grows hazy, even as the living breaths hitch and dwindle painfully, a part of him knows— this will be forever. Forever pressed down, forever dying and weeping and choking and unable to die for good. He cannot move. He is alone, and no one is coming.

The only person who knows he is buried is the person who buried him.

Jon dies.

Jon is still dead, when they dig him up.

He sort of really hates that he has to be grateful to Elias. All the same, the gratitude is immeasurable, paralyzing. Unspeakable. Unspeakable, which seems like an excellent reason not to actually verbally thank him, particularly considering it's apparently Elias’s fault Daisy ever hunted him in the first place.

Two murders in cold blood. And all Jon had ever suspected him was of tax fraud. (Jon misses Sasha. Sasha is dead.)

On the bright side of possibly the most traumatic thing that’s ever happened to him in recent history, Tim is being nice to him again. If niceness counts as shouting in his face the second he came back to life and helping Martin drag him to his feet and away from Daisy.

She’d stood watching them with sharp and shaded eyes from the edge of the trees. A phone in one hand and a gun in the other. Even Melanie stood between them, glaring at Daisy with twitching hands. It isn’t til Daisy says into the phone something along the lines of an insult towards Jon combined with an insult towards Elias, combined with some sort of affirmation that she just nods at them and just sort of….fades into the woods. Like some kind of gun-wielding, homicidal woodland spirit.

It’s all quite surreal.

Not as surreal as Melanie shoving him into a van emblazoned with a cartoon ghost painted between crosshairs, or Martin and Tim piling in after.

“Jon? Jon, just— oh god, is that blood?” Martin’s voice hits a pitch that makes Jon blink. “His shirt—I thought that was dirt —Christ, Tim, look at his neck!”

“Jesus, that’s—okay, okay, okay,” Tim mutters, rifling around beneath the seats. “Melanie, do you have any first aid in this thing?”

“We aren't going nowhere?” Jon says nonsensically. His head is full of cotton, and maybe topsoil. Martin shoots him a low-browed expression. Jon stares back, blinking rapidly. Something shifts in his stomach, and he’s pretty sure it’s only partially dirt. He leans against the seat, reveling in the feel of cheap, sticky vinyl against his skin.

“Jon?”

Martin’s face hovers closer, and Jon reaches up very carefully to press his thumb beneath Martin’s eye. Martin goes perfectly still.

“Mm. Still brown.” He pats Martin’s cheek, leaving a smear of soil as he leans back again. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. Wait, what?”

“Martin, you can flirt later, grab that water bottle.” Tim crowds next to him, scowling. “Right. Zombie boss, sit up. Are you gonna tell the truth if I ask you if you have brain damage?”

“No. I mean yes. I don’t? Dying doesn’t give you brain damage.” Jon frowns. “In my experience.”

“Jesus christ.”

“So are we going to a hospital?” Melanie calls from the front as the engine kicks to life. She throws a hand over the seat, leaning back to look at them. “I feel like we should be going to a hospital.“

“And say what?” Tim says, rubbing his temple “‘Oh yeah our boss got buried alive by a murdercop, could you take a look at him? He was also sort of dead when we dug him up, but we think he’s fine now, just a bit of brain damage! Oh, what happened? Well, oh, our other boss framed him for murder that he actually committed, and then after he threatened the murdercop to show us where the first boss was fucking buried! “

“Ok! I get it, no hospital. Jeez, don’t bite my bloody head off,” Melanie grumbles, pulling out into the road. “Just an idea. Then where are we going?”

“We could go back to the Archives?” Martin says. He wrings his hands around the waterbottle that Jon eyes warily. “Basira’s probably gone, and I can’t see Detective Tonner going back there if she’s not there.”

“We are not going anywhere Elias might be,” Melanie spits, turning a hard corner. Jon’s stomach does a cartwheel, something coppery pooling in his mouth. Gross. “Can’t believe I’m bloody trapped working with you all.”

“We can’t bring him to his place, I think he got evicted when he was on the run,” Martin says, voice heightening.

Jon sort of feels like he should somehow contribute to this conversation. He leans up to the front seats, ignoring Tim’s exasperated noise.

“Actually,” he says raspily. “Can we pull over?”

“What? Why?” Melanie turns another corner, and Jon’s stomach flips again. Something’s crawling up his throat. “The farther we get from that homicidal pig the better.”

“I think.” Hm. “I swallowed a significant amount of dirt. And er. Blood. And I don’t particularly want to get it in your van, so—"

There’s a chorus of noises, and Jon retreats with his hands raised in defense.

“Jesus, Jon!”

“Why didn’t you say something?” Martin asks, staring at him like he’s about to start hacking up mud right there. Which. Jon’s stomach does another spectacular aerial maneuver.

“I did. Just now. So if we could—” He watches the dark trees outside slow from a blur, then blur again. They jolt to a halt, and Jon doesn’t wait, staggering into the night air. He has about one second to enjoy it— air! Breathing! The novelty of it all! Before he’s suddenly on his knees, light beaming all around him.

Jon can’t be sure what his stomach lining tastes like, or what it would feel like to have his lungs inverted. He can’t be sure, but he has a pretty good idea.

Jon hacks up what feels like grave's worth of dirt. A throat’s worth of blood. Someone is swearing behind him, and someone else is rubbing circles into his back as he pours his insides out onto the pavement. It sort of feels like he’s dying. Maybe he is. He should probably be able to tell by now.

As the wracking of his body abates, he clutches dizzily at the hand on his back, half-turning.

“Th’re were birds,” he slurs, then turns away again to spit filth onto the road. He clutches the hand tighter, trying to make them understand. “”s nighttime. Why were there birds?”

“It’s okay, Jon you’re— oh god, his—Jon, what happened to your hand?”

“Had—” he coughs, eyes streaming. Martin’s face is a blur in front of him. “I had a fever.”

“Right, are we sure we shouldn’t be headed to a hospital?” Melanie’s voice is sharp, her silhouette taut and angular in the headlights. “He’s been cleared of all the murder charges by now, we can just make up some lie—”

“No hospital,” Jon pants, leaning into Martin’s arm. “Don’ think they’d like me very much. Hospitals hate it when people die.”

There’s a long silence. The birds, there had been birds singing, he’s sure of it. Now there’s just the low chug of the van, Martin’s breath in his ear.

“Okay, you’re...christ.” Tim sounds tired. “Okay, here’s the plan. Melanie, you’ll drop us off at mine, then you and Martin go—go find his stuff, stop by a pharmacy. Jon, you’re coming home with me. But you better not like, take pictures of the inside of my house.”

“Don’ be ridiculo— egck.” Jon spits out a glob of blood, grimacing. “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t have a camera w'th me.”

Tim looks at him for about three seconds before turning and climbing back into the van. Melanie follows, Martin dallies, eyes a miraculous brown with like, light and everything from Melanie’s headlights.

“Jon,” Martin says. His voice is shaking. “You’re—you’re going to be okay, okay?”

Jon straightens up painfully, letting Martin support him back to the van.

“There were birds,” he says again, pinching his eyes shut. “I remember.”

Tim is still being nice. It’s still surreal.

It might have to do with him having been bloody and covered in gravedirt, since that seems like it would play on heartstrings for anyone, but Jon is currently sitting in Tim’s home, hair wet from a shower, towel pressed to his neck and trying very hard to memorize the sensation of breathing through an unobstructed windpipe. And it’s just sort of. Making him nervous.

“Here, boss.” A mug is set down in front of him that he takes with trepidation. It smells and looks like tea, but the last time Tim made tea was never, and it had tasted awful.

Tim seems to sense his hesitation.

“Martin’s not the only one who can make tea,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Though I admit mine does lack that certain special ingredient of true—”

“Sugar?” Jon asks, choking down a bitter swallow.

“Yeah, that.” Tim sits down across from him. Surveying him. Jon can practically see him formulating a little checklist. “Fresh out of true sugar, but I’ve got first aid, if you’re cool with me dealing with the whole battlescar thing you have going on. Very edgy, but could probably do with less actual blood. Martin said he’d pick up food on his way, along with all the stuff he was going to grab from your friend’s, but I have some leftovers if you can’t wait, it’s—”

“Why are you doing this?”

It is the closest thing to a miracle Jon has ever experienced—everything in his life included—that no compulsion leaks into his voice. Tim, for his part, looks surprised. Then unhappy. Then upset. Then resigned.

“You don’t think I’m that much of an asshole to not care about my friend literally dying from being buried alive in an unmarked grave?”

Hm. Friend. That’s a word.

“Caring is different from.” He gestures at the towel, the tea in front of him. “You could have left me at the Archives. I hardly think Elias would have killed me if he went through all the trouble of holding Basira hostage and getting you to dig me up. Plus, um. Hm.” He sips his tea.

Plus Elias killing him wouldn’t make him dead, he doesn’t say. Seems a bit much.

Tim makes a face.

“Look, let’s just—just clear the air. Because I know I’ve been….look, I was really messed up for a while. Pissed. At you. Rightfully so. Still sort of am, but it’s….getting old, if I’m being honest and that—” Tim exhales. “You were dead, Jon. Jesus.”

“I’m sor—”

“Don’t—don’t apologize for that, christ.” Tim doesn’t seem to be able to settle on a tone of voice, and he sighs again. “Just.”

“Before. I know I—I was behaving in quite.” Jon considers. “An off-putting manner, for a time.”

Tim laughs. Not bitter, not happy. Just a very factual laugh.

“You were—you thought I was capable of killing you, you fucking stalked me, you made me feel—there was Jane, and then you, and I was just so—I was fucking scared, you know? I’ve been around one other thing in my life that made me feel like that, just one. And that just…I don’t know, Jon.”

“I am...deeply sorry for the stalking,” Jon says anxiously. “And the thinking you were going to kill me. I couldn’t control that part very well, but I could control the stalking, so. I’m sorry I made you feel….unsafe.”

Made you fear for your life made you feel like you were going to die die die — shut up! Jon thinks pleasantly at the recursive little voice. It does. Another miracle.

“And now...Sasha.” Tim puts his face in his hands. His shoulders rise and fall.

“Sasha,” Jon agrees quietly, gazing into his tea.

“But now she’s been dead, and it...it makes sense?” Tim’s voice breaks. Jon says nothing. “Like. I remember being close to her, but not...not her her. And it’s almost...almost a relief, I guess, to know why I just felt bad around her all the time. Why it felt like she was already gone. Because. Because she was. She was gone. She’s gone. Dead, and I didn’t even….she’s dead.”

Tim stares plainly at the table.

“I’m…” Jon swallows. The cut on his neck burns. “I wish this hadn’t happened to her. To you. To any of us.”

There’s a long pause.

“Me too.” Tim shakes his head abruptly, standing. “But now it’s like—we all got dragged out into the woods to dig up your body, like some kind of B-list horror film, and that cop just—just stood there, while Martin and Melanie and I dug. Christ, I thought Martin was going to break the shovel, he was going so fast. And then we got you, he— ” Tim presses his hands to his eyes, for one-two-three seconds, then sighs heavily and turns to pick up his own mug. “Christ, Jon. You can’t die? Apparently? So at least I know it’s you, but what—how is that a thing? When murdercop showed up and Elias did his creepy blackmail routine, he went on about—you know what, who cares what Elias says. But is that—Jon, what the fuck? ”

“It’s a preexisting condition,” Jon explains, sipping more bitter tea. He eyes the door, wondering if Martin is close. “I sort of got—hm. You know Spiderman?”

Tim raises an eyebrow.

“Heard of him, yeah.”

Jon nods, studying his tea.

“It’s sort of like that,” he says steadily. “A spider killed and ate me when I was a child, and now I can’t stay dead.”

Tim sets down his mug so hard it splits, sending tea and ceramic coasting along the counter. Tim watches it for a moment, before turning his attention to Jon with a very tired expression.

“That,” Tim says at last. “Is not how I remember Spiderman.”

“Why do you think I work at the Magnus Institute?” Jon asks sullenly. “It’s not for the salary, and it’s not because I want to get eaten by the broom closet.”

Something clicks in his brain. His eyes widen.

“Is Michael the broom closet?”

“Okay,” Tim says, lowering himself into the chair. He leaves the shattered mess behind him. Jon almost comments on it, but thinks better of it. “Okay, let’s—you want to unpack the spider...thing now? Or wait til Martin gets here? We can all share our tragic backstories, or whatever, before I keep asking things I really have no way of preparing reactions to. Jesus.”

The unfortunate thing about not thinking before you speak is that you have to deal with the consequences of what you say. Jon copies Tim from before, pressing his hands to his eyes and counting to three.

“I made a statement about it,” he says eventually. “Recorded it, it should...Martin will bring it, it’s with my things. I don’t...particularly want to listen to it?”

He removes his hands from his eyes. Tim is watching him like he’s about to drop dead, and what do you know, Jon is kind of feeling like he’s about to do just that. His body aches. His neck stings. His hand is flaring up again. At least the worms scars are fine. Ha-ha, kidding, psychosomatic itch, his old friend.

“Everyone hates their voice on tape, you know,” he says weakly to break the silence. “Plus, I was there. I sort of know what happened.”

“Jesus,” Tim says again. There’s an awkward pause. Jon’s about to say something to break the silence— the only thing he can think of is that he’s pretty sure the painting on Tim’s wall is a fake, and he’s already regretting saying it before the words leave his mouth— but he’s saved by a knock at the door, then a muffled voice.

“Tim? Jon? It’s me, I’ve got—I think I just broke into a pharmacy? It’s fine though, I left money at the till, and, and the janitor deleted the footage! I just— it was closed, and I wasn’t sure what burns take, or if he needed more painkillers, but— ”

“Martin, there’s a 24-hour one down the street,” Tim calls, rising to his feet. “You didn’t need to…” he sighs, rubbing his temple. “Whatever. Whatever! Why not.”

He pauses.

“Jon, I never thought I’d have to tell you this,” he says, oddly sincere. “But I’m sorry you got buried alive.”

Jon doesn’t have the heart to correct him. He presses a hand to his neck, the slowly-forming scab where his life had spilled out. Where his breath had stopped again and again and again.

Alive, dead. They’re starting to run together.

Jon is asleep when they listen to the tape. Asleep, and standing over a grave, which he thinks is pretty on the nose. Can’t his nightmares get a touch more creative?

No, they can’t. Deep down, he knows why they can’t, but thinking about it stresses him out, so he’s just going to. Put that thought in a box. It’s worked so far, and it gives him the freedom to speculate about his own mental state.

He peers down at Naomi Herne.

“Are you a projection of my inability to die combined with the guilt of me being an asshole to you over when you thought you were going to die?” he tries to ask. His mouth doesn’t move, because of course it doesn’t, and he just stares harder.

Naomi stares right back, eyes oddly intense, until he can see them start to water. Finally, she blinks. He doesn’t. She flips him off.

Jon wakes up. Someone is moving nearby.

“Wha— who’s—”

A light flicks on, and Martin freezes by the closet door.

“Sorry! Sorry, I was just getting— Tim said there were extra blankets up here, and I was just—” Martin cringes. “Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you, you—um. Sleep well?”

“It’s.” Jon scrubs his face. “Sort of? I won a staring contest. So.” He blinks blearily. “What time is it?”

“About, about noon, I think? We thought we’d let you sleep, what with the d—” Martin goes still. Something in the air changes. Or maybe it’s just Martin’s expression?

“Noon? Really?” he scrubs his face again, sliding towards the edge of the bed. “Don’t tell me neither of you slept, you’ll be useless at work tod—”

“Okay, well, none of us are going into work, so that’s that solved.”

Jon pauses at Martin’s tone. He knows that tone. Dreads that tone. It’s the Jon-I’m-about-to-spend-twenty-minutes-arguing-with-you-about-ghost-spiders tone. Jon shudders.

“Martin, I can’t just—”

“And no, neither of us slept, because we were sort of busy listening to your, your—Jon, I don’t—” To Jon’s horror, Martin folds his face into his hands, shoulders going up and down, and Jon—Jon really isn’t good with the comforting thing, he thought Martin had learned his lesson about that with the worms—”

Martin lowers his hands, and Jon lets out a huge exhale when his face is dry and more-or-less calm. Unhappy, certainly. Jon fidgets.

“Jon, you died.”

“Oh.” Jon starts pulling on a nearby jumper. “Yes.”

“No, no, I mean—I was right there! We all were! You, you—Michael just, just showed up and, and stabbed you to death in your office? And you just weren’t going to say anything?”

“‘I know I’m having a bit of a rough go of it mental health-wise, but the monster Sasha saw just showed up out of nowhere and killed me, and then I came back to life. Oh, yes, he also just conveniently vanished into thin air right after. I think he ate Helen, too!’” Jon swallows back a bitter taste. He starts pulling up the covers on the bed, for lack of anything else to do with his hands. “Really, Martin, I wouldn’t have believed me.”

“We could have called an ambulance before you, you know, died,” Martin says, taking up the other side of the sheet. They flatten it together, and then Martin crosses his arms tightly, hunching. “I—I just don’t like that we—I was right there. I could have— ”

“I mean,” Jon prods the pillows, exhaling sharply. “You did call an ambulance. I understand what you’re trying to say, but you very much did call an ambulance.”

“Jon, please, just—”

“It’s fine,” Jon says, a little desperately. “It happened! It happened and I died, but I’m not dead, and it’s fine, so just—just leave it, Martin.”

Martin purses his lips, but thankfully stops. Jon scrubs his face.

“Sorry,” he says.

Martin smiles weakly.

“You don’t need to be.”

Jon raises his eyes to the ceiling, certain if he speaks something ridiculous will come out of his mouth. Would you mind being there the next time I die or Did you know your eyes are brown or I think it’s insane you don’t hate me for almost getting you killed by worms or I’m not sure if I’m still human or if I’ve ever been one —

“Tim’s made breakfast,” Martin says, when it’s clear Jon is not going to figure out a normal thing to say. “We can—we can wrap those up again. Then we’ll, you know, figure things out? With Elias and…everything.”

“I—“ Jon swallows. “Alright.”

Martin smiles brightly before vanishing through the door, and something unfolds inside Jon that feels strangely like grief.

Breekon-and-Hope does not kill Jon.

Nikola Orsinov does not kill Jon.

Michael does not kill Jon (again), though not for lack of trying.

Jon looks into the eyes of a woman who shouldn’t be here. She was just like him before, and she’s just like him again.

“Yu, you’re d— you died,” Jon stammers. His tongue isn’t doing what it's supposed to, framing vowels all wrong, scraping along his teeth in weird ways. He attributes it to having a gag in his mouth for however long he’s been here, the taste of fabric probably staining the roof of his mouth for the rest of his life—lives. Had they even given him water?

Had he ever even been thirsty?

“Died,” Helen says, looking past him. “Hm...no, no, I don’t think that’s the word.”

“Be—but you’re,” Jon makes eye contact with a particularly gruesome waxwork that he hopes isn’t supposed to be Albert Einstein, and immediately looks away. “You were gone.”

“And now Michael’s gone.” Helen shrugs. “And I’m here.”

“But you shouldn’t be,” Jon insists, uncertain of why he’s even arguing with the— the throat of delusion? while a monstrous mannequin is probably sharpening her tanning knives in the other room. “You shouldn’t be here, you—you—you said Helen is gone, you can’t—”

Helen (?) sighs.

“Do you really want to sit here and debate this? Helen’s gone, but Michael’s gone too, so I’m Helen now.”

“So she’s...dead?” She’s not here. She’s—

“I’m Helen now,” the woman in the doorway repeats. “But that’s just a name. Do you always argue with people who try to help you?”

Jon rubs his forehead.

“The door is open,” she says tentatively. “If you’re ready?”

“No," Jon sighs into a laugh, "No, not really." And she stands aside for him to make his way across the threshold.

Jon is big enough to admit, that the ghost of Gerard Keay fucking terrifies him. Not Gerard himself, or the fact that he most certainly just doomed Jon to a bloody death by two hunters, but…

But the fact that he’s standing before Jon at all.

“But how,” Jon says again, a little desperately. Gerard’s page flutters as he waves it, and Jon is finding it very difficult to think of it as paper. “You’re not supposed—”

“Not supposed to be here,” Gerard agrees, rolling his eyes. They’re half-transparent, and Jon can see the pupils all the way around. “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. And it sucks. Which is why I wasn't about to let you leave me like this. ”

Jon sighs. The book in his hands is disgustingly soft. Jon pointedly doesn’t wonder what skincare regimen the cover had used.

“They’ll kill me,” he says, glancing towards the door with distaste. “Probably quite violently.”

Gerard shrugs.

“Dying’s not so bad. It’s staying dead that sucks.”

Jon looks down at the crumpled page in his hand, and can’t help but imagine his own. And so Jonathan Sims ended. And then ended again. And again. And again, christ, we’re going to have to get another page for this guy—

“I sort of,” he says carefully. “Have to disagree?”

There’s a long pause. Gerard fixes him with a look that shouldn’t be quite so piercing for someone so incorporeal.

“Mmm,” he nods eventually, bobbing a bit. “Tough break. What, you piss off the grim reaper?”

“Not…to my knowledge.” Jon considers, suddenly very tired. “But I seem to piss off a lot of people without knowing it, so. That could actually be it, I suppose.”

Gerard makes a noise that could be a laugh.

“Right. Well. Just between us dead people, then—you wanted to know how I’m here? Well, I’m not.”

“You’re...right in front of me.” Jon frowns, restraining the urge to correct him. Jon’s not dead he’s just…died. “The, the book holds— you’re right here.”

“Something is,” Gerard points at his page, then taps his chest. “I’m me, because I remember being me. I’ve already died, though, and there’s no— well normally there’s no coming back from that. Something’s missing, for everyone bound in that thing.”

“But what about….what about me, then?” Jon asks, clutching the book. “I— I’ve definitely died, it just doesn’t stick.”

“I….dunno what your deal is.” Gerard looks genuinely apologetic, crossing his arms and surveying Jon. “You seem like a whole person—”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah, you’re welcome.” Gerard bobs a bit in midair, still studying Jon. “But it’s...weird. Death’s usually the last stop. There’s a reason they call it Terminus, and it’s not ‘cos it sounds edgy. How many times?”

“I—um. More than seven, at least.”

“You don’t know?”

Jon’s chest tightens. He’s not sure what his face does. Gerry squints at him for a second, before waving a hand.

“Sorry, guess that’s—but yeah, I’m not….here. More dead than alive, probably, and there’s no way back. My best guess for you is some kind of revolving door situation. You can’t get past, just get spun right back ‘round to where you came from. Not quite...making it through.” Gerard chuckles. “Could say you’re at death’s door. Just not getting invited in.”

“Maybe I did piss someone off,” Jon mutters, eyes falling to the book. “Don’t suppose there’s much hope they’d cut me a break anytime soon?”

Gerard shrugs again.

“Never say die, I guess.”

Standing before the ghost of Gerard Keay, ribcage strung with dread, Jon laughs.

“Died yet?”

There’s a crack through the phone, like Melanie had popped gum across the line. He wouldn’t be surprised. She’s been leaving veritable armies of chew bubblegum on every available surface she thinks Elias will touch.

Jon tucks the phone against his ear, searching for his passport amongst his things on the bed.

“Would you care if I said yes?”

“I mean, sure, that sucks. But I’m not the one—”

“I—Melanie, give me that! Stop—Jon?”

Jon actually feels his mouth twitch up at the scuffle across the line. Martin hisses something, and there’s a loud snicker before Martin’s voice is coming through the speaker.

“Jon? Please don’t tell me you actually died.”

“I didn’t actually die,” he says, lowering to phone to examine his passport. “I met a dead person, though. We had a lot in common.”

“You...that’s, that’s cool? I guess?”

Jon nods, then remembers he’s on the phone, then promptly whacks his cheek bringing it back to his face.

“It—it was, um, cool. Well, no, it was sort of, of upsetting, I think the world might be run by terrible things and we have no real escape from them.”

“Um.”

“But I met Gerry Keay!” he says desperately, cursing himself. Stop being maudlin, nobody needs that, let alone Martin even if you are all going to die die die— “He— he was nice. I mean, he was dead, but he—how are things there?”

“I—right. G-good? Sorry, you met— you actually met a dead person, and that person was...?”

“Gerard Keay,” Jon confirms. “Gerry.” His eyes fall on his bag, the one holding Gerry’s page folded neatly in the statement file Elias sent him that’s sticking out at a jaunty angle. “He says, he says good luck with the apocalypse? He also said to spit on Jurgen Leitner’s grave for him, so maybe we should find out where he’s buried.”

“That’s—” Martin laughs, the noise a little strained. “Brilliant. I’ll get on that.”

“Please do.”

There’s a long pause. Jon lets the silence sit, wishing he could see Elias’ face when the long-distance call expense came in.

“You’re safe right now? Not really sure… where you would have run into a dead person? Should, ha, should I be worried?”

Safe. That’s a word.

Jon passes an eye over the flimsy hotel door. His flight is disgustingly early tomorrow, but not so early he doesn’t think Trevor and Julia couldn’t find him and kill him and kill him and kill him, because he really doesn’t want to picture what they’ll do to him if they find out he can’t really stay dead—

“Mm,” he manages, through a suddenly dry throat. “Yes—I mean. No, you shouldn’t—I’m, I’m quite safe, that is.”

“Good, that’s—that’s good. ”

Jon nods fervently into the phone, chewing his tongue. Would be great to be able to speak a complete and coherent sentence, but for some reason Jon can’t see that happening right now, with the odd pressure on his chest. Maybe he’s having a heart attack. He hopes he won’t die of it with Martin on the phone.

“Well. Things are—things are okay here, too! Tim says hi. Well, no, he says if you die in America, they’ll charge you for it, so don’t. But I’m pretty sure he was joking.”

“Mm. He wasn’t. But I say hello back.”

“Ri—right.”

“How,” Jon clears his throat. “How are you? How are the, um. Statements? ”

Martin snorts.

“Is that a trick question?”

“Oh—well.” Jon rolls his eyes. “Forgive me for hoping they’d gotten better while I was away.”

“Nope. Same old, same old, just, just a bunch of stories begging me to become a vegetarian.”

Jon hums, feeling his mouth quirk without his permission. He waits for Martin to go on. The heart attack can wait.

“Jon?”

“Still here.”

“Can I…ask you something awful?”

Jon hesitates, squinting at the wall.

“That depends, Martin. We have very different definitions of awful, since my ‘awful’ tends to be your ‘adorable-multilegged-deserving-to-live-in-the-Archives—“

“No, no,” Martin huffs. “Not—nothing like that. And for the record I’m sorry about all that, I didn’t know—well, I wouldn’t have been so, you know, nice to them if I knew—“

“A giant spider killed me once?”

“That’s—well. Yeah.”

Jon leans back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. It’s a hideous pale green, and Jon decides after a moment it’s not a ceiling he’d mind dying to.

“I…Thank you, Martin, I…appreciate the—the sentiment.”

“Sur—sure thing.”

“You, um—you had a question?”

Martin’s quiet for a second. Jon imagines him shifting from foot to foot, the way he does when he’s about to present a particularly poorly formatted report, or inform him of a dog in the Archives.

“What’s it like?” Martin asks. “D-dying.”

Jon blinks at the ceiling.

“Oh.”

“You, you don’t have to answer—I’m, I’m sorry, that— god, that’s insensitive, I shouldn’t have asked—“

“No it’s it’s fine, Martin, it’s—“ Jon exhales. “I’d be curious. If I were you.”

That’s the truth, at least.

“You still don’t, don’t have to answer.“ Martin’s tone is strangely firm. Jon gets the impression that he really…doesn’t have to answer, if he doesn’t want to. “I shouldn’t—I really shouldn’t have asked.”

There’s a gentle pause. Jon is aware of a rope being pulled between his lungs.

“Jon?”

“It.” Jon licks his lips. He turns his head enough to catch the bag, the file sticking out from it. He’ll need to find something to burn it with. Soon. Soon. “It’s…terrifying.”

“Oh.”

There’s a hush of static. Martin breathing into the receiver.

“I’m sorry, Jon.”

Jon almost laughs.

“What for?”

There’s another long pause.

“Not that kind of sorry,” Martin says quietly. “Just…sorry as in sorrow, I guess? I wish—I’m sorry, Jon, you don’t—“

“Martin—“

“I just—just come back soon? I—we all—I mean, you—we need you here, okay?”

It’s said in a rush, and Jon couldn’t guess what Martin was thinking if his life depended on it. He almost laughs at the thought. It’s good thing it doesn’t, but it wouldn’t really matter.

“Alright,” says Jon. He closes his eyes. Static crackles across the line. “I’ll be back soon.”

It is a week before the maybe-end-of-the-world, and there are four hundred and thirteen eyes in Elias’ office. Excluding Jon’s. He meets the gaze of one on Elias’ cufflink that winks at him in the yellow light. Jon glares back at it.

“You’re prepared, then?” Elias asks. He’s guiding a pen over some sort of document. Jon is fairly certain he’s just circling things at random. “Your team ready to go?”

“Don’t you Know?”

Elias’ eyes twitch, but then he must remember he’s too magnanimous and all-powerful to do something as immature as rolling them, because he just sighs.

“Stop acting like a child, Jon.”

“Stop traumatizing my employees, Elias.”

Elias’ eyes twitch once more—Jon congratulates himself—before he sets down his pen and reaches beneath his desk.

For one frozen, suffocating moment, Jon is dead certain he is going to pull out a gun. ‘Did you hear about Jonathan Sims?’ they’ll say. ‘Couldn’t even stay alive long enough to stop the apocalypse, can you believe—‘

“Here.” The tape clunks on the desk, muted by papers. Elias watches him pick it up. Jon resents the fact that he probably Knows what he was thinking. Knows that his hands are shaking, as he reaches for it.

“Another tape. Thank you.” Jon flips it over, and not finding a label, fakes a smile and slides it back across the desk. “But I actually have one or two tapes downstairs, so I don’t really—“

“It is a tape regarding the End, Jon, and you need to take it seriously,” Elias says, not a little forcefully. “Don’t think I’m ignorant of your condition. The fact that you can’t stay dead doesn’t mean you can’t be impacted by it.”

“You’re not worried,” Jon states with certainty, wrinkling his nose.

“About you?” Elias huffs, sliding the tape back. “No. This is the apocalypse, Jon, I think we’re past the point of pretending I care about all of you as people.”

“Wow!” Jon says with a bark of laughter. He always knew there was a reason the HR department was Like That, but he’d assumed it was something to do with funding. He slides the tape away again, just to watch Elias’ eye twitch. “So this is what, professional concern? Please. Don't think I don't know that whatever is on this tape is only going to benefit you.”

Elias purses his lips. He picks up the tape, turning it over in his hands and studying it for a long time.

Too long. Jon's heart judders in his chest.

“Are you afraid of dying, Jon?” Elias asks calmly.

The room is suddenly, consciously quiet.

"Well?"

Jon meets the single glass eye of the skull behind the desk. His mouth is very dry.

“I—I don’t see how that’s—“

“Terminus,” Elias says, and something metallic in his voice blocks out the sound of Jon’s breath in his chest, like the words are being projected directly into his brain. “Is not Knowable. It is not the antithesis of the Eye in the same way the Stranger is, but it cannot be Seen, and it cannot be avoided. You can’t avoid it, Jon. But you know that.”

Jon…does know that. He thinks, right now, sitting here, he might know it better than he’s ever known anything. He is going to die one day, and he will not come back. It’s the simplest truth in the world. The most terrible. He’s standing in front of a blood-rusted door. He’s staring at a ceiling that flickers and spins and sparks. He is—he is—

“It is the End, truly. Resolute in a way that very few things are, and always, always, hungry. No one and nothing is the exception. That includes you, Jon. It is the first fear, the last fear. In many ways the only fear. You end. You don't exist, anymore. It's the truest thing in the world. The only true thing. The very horror of inescapable annihilation, fueled by so many others. The Stranger here to kill you. The Desolation of life taken all around you. The Loneliness of the unmarked grave. You’ve died alone so many times, Jon. Haven’t you?”

Jon doesn’t understand—he’s going to die alone right now, what’s the point of asking? He can feel it, the freezing, breathless certainty, a quickly fraying rope, and he’s going to die alone here beneath the weight of the earth over and over and over until. Until.

“Alone, and afraid, and meaningless.” The voice in his head is a sneer. “And yet? You’re. Still. Here. So what I really want to know, is how someone as pathetic as you could possibly have the power to avoid—“

“What the hell are you doing?!”

Elias’ voice stops abruptly and it’s like a curtain is ripped off the room. Jon nearly leaps to his feet, staggering as he strangles down a scream. He’s aware of himself, breathing, of people shouting and moving and he shoves away hands that try to grab him that want to kill him.

Jon bolts from the room, the taste of blood and dirt, the screaming of birds that shouldn’t be there. The hallway tilts beneath— the hallway. The Institute, he’s in—the Institute, he needs to get to the Archives, he’s only died twice in the Archives, that’s mostly safe, he can—

He’s not sure when he made it to the bottom of the stairs, but he doesn’t remember there being a wall there. He slams into it, nearly toppling back, only walls don’t normally have arms, but then this is the Magnus Institute, and it would be just his luck to stumble into some kind monster hallway and this is how he dies, alone, again—

But then he’s looking into a pair of eyes. A pair of very brown and worried eyes.

“Jon? Jon, it’s, it’s alright, just, just breathe—is something—what happened? Nothing’s, nothing’s chasing you?”

“No. Um. Shit,” Jon says, sagging backwards. It turns into a laugh, and then a sob. “Dammit, I—I shouldn’t—“

“Are you hurt?” Martin—god, Martin looks genuinely worried, he doesn’t know he can’t do a thing about this, can’t stop Jon dying because nothing can stop Jon dying, and it sort of makes Jon want to put his face in his hands and cry about it. Martin just wants to help. And Jon—Jon can’t fucking be helped! That’s it. That’s it. “I can—come, come with me, I can make you some tea, we’ll just, sit? Sitting?”

Jon sits, still catching his breath. It doesn’t matter. Georgie was right. It’s all one moment. Only that moment is now. That moment was when he was eight. That moment is sitting in his head like a tumor.

“Jon you’re kind of—we’re safe, right? You look like you were—there’s not like, a horrible monster about to break into the Archives right?”

There’s already a monster in the Archives, haven’t you heard? Jon doesn’t say. Doesn’t seem particularly confident, or approachable, of a good boss to say. But it’s alright, he’ll be gone soon, he won’t be here anymore—

Somewhere in the room, a tape clicks on.

"Oh god, what's—"

The Archive door slams open, and Martin jumps a foot in the air.

“Okay, we need to kill him!” Melanie bursts into the Archives alongside Tim, wielding a literal machete that she points at the door. “He can’t keep doing this to people!”

“No argument here. It’s in a week, he’s told us everything important, it’s not like we need him around anymore, and frankly I think he’s full of shit about us dying too,” Tim says harshly. “Goddammit, his face, it—you don’t think Elias actually killed—“

“Um.” Martin says, darting a look at Jon behind him. They don’t seem to have noticed him, and he’s sort of enjoying the lack of attention. “Sor—sorry, who are we killing? Also, um, Melanie, I think that machete’s cursed? It was in Artefact Storage for years—”

“What’s this.” Basira appears in the doorway, books stacked to her chin. Her eyebrows twitch. Jon thinks that might be indicating annoyance, or maybe surprise, or maybe neither of those.

“We think Elias did his—his memory thing to Jon,” Melanie snarls. She throws the machete to her desk where it immediately starts bleeding from the metal. Martin shoots a startled look at Jon, who doesn’t look back. “And he’s going to keep doing it to people—fuck prison, he needs to be gone.”

Basira’s eyes skirt past Tim, past Melanie. Jon shrinks in his seat, willing Martin to take one more step to the left. Martin doesn’t get the message.

“Jon?”

Melanie and Tim turn as one. Time to be—confident, or no nonsense, or whatever. It doesn’t matter.

“I think,” Jon says shakily. He clears his throat, scrubbing his face. “I think I would like some water.”

“Jon—“ Tim’s expression sags.

“It’s fine,” he says. It is! It’s. “I just—just need some—some—“

Jon presses his face into his hands with a single sharp exhale. The Archive is very quiet. We’re going to die, Jon thinks idly. Nausea turns over in a gut churning with phantom dirt. Worms that aren’t there burrow into it, tilling the earth. All of us. Soon. Soon.

“Jon,” Tim’s voice breaks the silence. Jon just shakes his head. Once, twice, for good measure. Tim’s voice goes thin. “Jon, he didn’t like, actually kill you, right?”

“No,” Jon laughs, still shaking his head. It’s funny! It’s funny because people don’t need to kill Jon to prove he’s this weak. “No, he didn’t—didn’t very much need to.”

“Jon—“

Something cold and foreign budges at his arm— a knife, a worm, a gun, it doesn’t matter, it wants to murder him. Jon shouts wordlessly, leaping to his feet. There’s a gasp of dismay. Something shatters across the Archive floor.

Martin looks sadly across the spreading pool of glass and water that had been knocked from his hand. Somebody mutters christ.

“I’m.” Jon bites his tongue as something shifts inside of him, burgeoning, violent and hysterical. It claws at his skin, driving his voice from his throat with a sound like a paper shredder. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.“

What do you do?

What do you do when you know the first and final truth? When it fills you up? When there’s no more room for the fear?

Jon doesn’t quite feel his limbs as he folds himself to carefully lay down on the ground. He doesn't even remember making the decision. But they do and he must have, becaue the Archive ceiling is hanging above him, and two brown eyes are peering down at him.

“Um—um, Jon?”

“Fantastic,” Tim sighs from above. “He fucking broke Jon. Pub night's canceled, I'm going to kill that smug piece of shit.”

“Jon you—“

“No, I’ll kill him,” Melanie mutters. “We—we can't just let him go around butchering people like this. It’s not right.”

“Jon, say something—?”

“No, it’s not.” Basira says. Her voice is firm. “But we’ll deal with the clown apocalypse first, and then we’ll deal with him. Nobody’s killing anyone until after the end of the world.”

Jon stares at the ceiling for what feels like several more minutes, fighting down what feels like a scream in his tightening chest, before the brown eyes vanish from his view. He hears something—a chair moving, the chime of broken glass being swept, something rustling down next to him, before he convinces the muscles in his neck to tilt his head to the side.

Martin is sitting down next to him on the floor. He smiles weakly, shuffling the papers in his lap.

“Alright if I join you?”

Jon tries to glare at him, but his gaze drifts back to the ceiling. There are a disconcerting amount of spiderwebs. He opens his mouth to tell Martin that it’s very much his fault that they’re there.

“I’m going to die,” is what he says instead. “I’m going to be dead.”

There’s a snort to his left, and he looks over to see Tim lowering himself to the ground, stuffing a jacket beneath his head before stretching out between Jon and where the pool of water and glass had been.

“We’re all going to die,” Tim says in a flat tone that’s still oddly cheerful. “But I for one, hope mine happens while I’m putting an axe through a mannequin clown monster. How do you want to go, Martin?”

“Oh, um.” Martin pauses, and all Jon can do is stare. The floor is freezing, but it’s hardly worth noticing. “I guess doing—doing something good? Something that…something that helps people.”

Jon tries to speak, but the air that had been so eager to burst from his lungs earlier is gone.

“I hope I die killing Elias,” another voice says darkly, and Jon can’t stretch his neck back enough, but he glimpses Melanie’s lying behind him on the floor, arms pillowed beneath her head right by his own. “That would help people.”

Martin hums, and Jon doesn’t—he doesn’t—

“Basira?” Melanie calls. “Have you got a way you want to go?”

“I don’t—“

“C’mon,” Tim says with a yawn. “If you lay on the floor and tell us how you want to die you can get your Magnus union card.”

“Those do not exist,” Melanie mutters.

“Fine. I’m not planning on dying,” Basira sighs, lower herself to sitting crosslegged against the desk. She cracks open a book, the spine creaking quietly. “But sure. When I die, I want it to be when…hm. I want it to be doing something I knowingly chose.”

They don’t ask Jon. They don’t ask Jon, and he stares at the ceiling as Tim begins to doze quietly, as Basira reads her book, and Melanie starts going on some rant about videography style. They don’t ask, and Martin flips through whatever file he’s working on and occasionally comments on what Melanie’s saying, and he doesn’t ask Jon a thing. Until—

“Jon can you—can I do anything?” he says, while Melanie’s explanation has reached a lull. “Anything to help?”

“No.” His voice sounds off. The ceiling above him presses down. But it’s the truth. “No, there’s not—Thank you, Martin.”

“Don’t mention it,” Martin says with a sheepish smile, rubbing his neck. Jon exhales. What a ridiculous thing to say.

“Thank you,” he says again. He’s going to mentioning it, of course he’s going to mention it. He’s going to keep mentioning it long as he’s alive to. “Thank you.”

Jon never listens to the statement Elias tried to give him. Melanie tells him she smashed it when she’d broken into the office, and Elias never brought it up again.

Sometimes Jon will stare at the ceiling and feel some sort of revulsion, some sort of hunger welling up in him at the fact. He will never know what was on that tape. He’ll never know.

It is three nights before the maybe-end-of-the-world. Jon turns on his side, away from the pale ceiling of his new flat, and presses his eyes shut.

It is the night before the maybe-end-of-the-world. Tim is a little bit drunk.

“So, Zombie Boss,” he says, slinging himself down next to Jon where he's perched on his uncomfortable hotel bed with a book he can’t focus on. Jon scowls as Tim nudges him, then tries to unscowl, because it is the night before the maybe-end-of-the-world, and they’re all going to die, and he can afford to be more approachable. “What’s next?”

“Well, we’ll leave early, Daisy goes in to set up the bomb—”

“No, no, no—” Tim waves a hand, nearly thwacking the book from Jon’s hand. “No, I mean. Like. You….” he stretches the vowel, looking increasingly uncomfortable about it until Jon closes the book and frowns at him. “...have died.”

“Yes? That doesn’t mean I know how to set up a bomb.”

“No, I—ugh.” Tim rubs his eyes dramatically, pulling the skin down til the bottoms of his eyes are visible. Jon reconsiders his book. “I mean. Like. You’ve died. What’s...what’s next? What’s after?”

“Oh.” Jon clears his throat. “Ah. Hm.”

“Those aren’t super reassuring noises.” Tim grins humorlessly. “Look, I was brought up Anglican, but I can’t say I’m still a subscriber, so if you’re about to tell me hell is real and is full of worms, I’m just going to—”

“No, no, it’s—” Jon winds his hands together, squinting at the bland hotel art. It’s been replaced recently, switched out because a customer said it was ‘too purple’. He’s not sure how he knows that. “No I sort of...I can’t really tell you?”

Tim looks taken aback.

“As in you...what, if you share the secrets of the afterlife you’ll be cursed? Aren’t you already sort of cursed with weird psychic magic and immortality?”

“It’s not immortality,” Jon says immediately, sharper than he meant. He frowns. “No, I mean—I literally can’t tell you. There’s nothing. I mean. I don’t know? I die, I’m not...dead. If there is something, I don’t think I’ve ever made it there.”

Tim groans, throwing himself back on the bed and covering his face.

“Great. Fantastic. Of course,” he whines through his hands. “Please tell me purgatory’s, like, a beach at least.”

Jon sniffs.

“I’m pretty sure hell is where they keep the beaches, actually.”

“Didn’t you grow up in Bournemouth?”

“So I know what I’m talking about.”

Tim grabs a pillow from the bed, burying his face in it and making a noise that could be a bark of laughter. Or maybe a shout of vague distress. Jon doesn’t ask.

“So there’s— there’s nothing?” Tim says, lowering the pillow. “That’s it, just—? I mean— sorry, I’m not like trying to get you to talk about it, like bring anything up like Elias. Fuck Elias. Somebody should kill that guy.”

“And make sure he stays dead,” Jon agrees tiredly, then taps his fingers on his knee, considering. “It’s really...fine, Tim. My...mother was religious, but she wasn’t alive long enough to really...instill anything in me, so to speak. My grandmother was aggressively agnostic, and didn’t bother with any sort of religious education, so I don’t really believe I’ve—I’ve never really thought there would be anything? And then after—um. After I was, you know, eaten by a spider, I...”

“Had a spider-related existential epiphany?” Tim asks. Jon shrugs.

“I don’t know if that sort of belief system was an option for me, after. I sort of wish I’d had it, perhaps it would have….helped. But after, dying was just sort of...an act.” Jon frowns distastefully at the word. “Not even. It’s just a...transitory thing, one state of being to another. You’re here, and then you’re not.” He rolls his eyes to the ceiling, trying for some degree of levity. “Only, I’m apparently not very skilled at maintaining states.”

“Here and then you’re not.” Tim takes another swig of the flask Jon hadn’t even seen him bring. “I wish. Ha, I wish Sasha were here. Instead of not. My br—Danny too.”

Tim’s face does something terrifying and full of grief, before he throws a loose smile up at Jon.

“What the hell, even Gertrude! Let’s get everyone Here, we’ll have a big party with everyone who’s not supposed to be Here.” He tags another swig, head falling back on the duvet. “Break the rules, the lot of us.”

Jon taps his fingers against his leg, before letting himself fall back onto the bed. He and Tim stare at the water-warped hotel ceiling. He almost prefers the American one. There’s a damp spot shaped like a spider on this one that Jon glares at.

At least it’s not an eye.

“If,” says Tim eventually. “I die.”

“Tim—”

“And stay dead.”

“Tim.”

“Like you’re so very bad at doing.”

“Can we not do this.”

“It’s embarrassing for you, frankly.”

“Really not interested in—”

“But if I die —”

“ —last words or wills or—”

“I want you to know.”

Jon turns his head on the bed. Tim’s already looking at him, grinning broadly, and Jon’s chest goes still. Tim’s eyes are red and puffy, water caught in his eyelashes. Like he’s been crying this whole time.

“I hope you get to stay here.”

Music vibrates the air, high and melodic as some demented bird, and Jon doesn’t understand anything. No, that’s not quite right. He understands two things. Just the two.

He understands that he is going to die. And he understands that he is afraid.

And then it’s three things. He understands that he is going to die. He understands that he is afraid.

And he understands that there is a detonator in Tim’s hand.

For a moment, Jon thinks he’s dead.

Not died— dead. Present state, permanent status, the End, full stop. Terror and elation sing through him at once, suffocating and overwhelming and— oh. Hm. That’s a familiar grave.

Jon wanders closer, faintly aware that if he’s dead, he probably shouldn’t be thinking or feeling anything at all, unless somebody was right about the afterlife. The idea’s never really appealed to him.

He catches a glimpse over the edge of the grave. Naomi Herne is writing fuck off eyeball Jon in the dirt at the bottom, and when she sees him she flips him off. Hm. Hurtful, but not uncalled for.

He wanders. So he’s...asleep? But he’d died. He remembers dying—music, fear, confusion, burst of light, blah blah. So what the hell is he doing here?

He steps through a door, and a dead woman is walking away from Georgie, message delivered. Georgie’s eyes widen at the sight of him.

“Jon?” Her voice is underwater. In fact, Jon is underwater. Everything around him is filtered and blurry, the air thick with bizarre tastes that swirl together. Awful palette, to be honest.

“Jon, is that—I’m dreaming. Right. I’m….” Georgie sighs, casting around the dissection lab. “Had this one quite a lot lately. You’ve been here too, ‘course.”

Jon doesn’t reply, puzzling over the whole asleep-not-dead thing. He squints his eyes— and he has so, so many eyes— but the odd haze doesn’t clear. What’s the point of being made up of eyes if all of them need fucking lasik?

“You know,” Georgie says conversationally, perching on a lab table. “I think if we bought some of those bulk packages of plastic googly eyes, we could probably recreate this look in real life. ”

Jon pretends he’s nodding absently. He doesn’t move, though. Just stares. God, he’d kill for some saline.

“So wake up, yeah?” Georgie is saying, watching him watch her. “We need you here, Jon, I don’t think Martin knows how much you were whining about him over at my place. You need to tell him to his face you’ve got a crush on him, so I can film you trying to positively emote.”

Jon just stares. Stares until Georgie’s face sort of sags into pity, and stares until the room begins to fade, and stares even after everything in the world is gone except him.

He wishes he could close his eyes. He wishes a lot of things.

He doesn’t know where he’s supposed to be. He only knows where he wants to be. It’s not here.

He searches his dreams for doors, for signs, for a way out— wake up, like Georgie said. The Eye bears down on him, staring, and well, you can only go so long with something looking at you before you look back.

A voice whispers to him, as he looks into a pupil that is far too hungry, far too promising, far too close to everything he always imagined would one day kill him.

The voice whispers something about acceptance, or choice, or maybe identity theft.

“You’re a bit like me,” the voice says. It sounds sad.

The words don’t bode well—the first person who comes to mind who’s like him is Melanie, and that’s only by virtue of stature and predilection towards unnecessary argument.

The second person is...Helen. Was Helen. Helen is gone, she’s not— she’s not here anymore, because she stepped through a door and she was gone.

The pupil is blocking his whole vision, now, and that’s saying something. It’s dark and starving and deafening, too dim to see a thing, but he knows he’s standing on a threshold. A nighttime street filled with singing birds. A lonely burning sofa standing in a darkened room. A starless forest, his heart pounding in his ears.

He can’t see a thing for the shade of the pupil, but he knows there is something behind him. Something unknowable, unmoving. Something he could turn around walk towards, if he wished.

“Make your choice, Jon,” the voice says.

If Jon could sigh, he would. Of course. Of course this is the choice. As if he would be capable of turning, of even facing the thing behind him. As if he’s ever been anything but a coward when it comes to Terminus.

Jon doesn’t sigh, though he wants to. Doesn’t start shouting profanities at the Eye, though he really wants to. His heart pulls tight behind his sternum.

Is it really a heart, if it’s a dream? Is he just imagining the fear, making it up entirely?

Jon doesn’t know, and Jon doesn’t care, and Jon still doesn’t want to be dead. It’s simple, really.

He steps across the threshold of the empty door of the pupil. For a moment, he is still here. Then the dark closes in on him and it drinks the scream from his lungs until Jon is not here. Until he’s not anywhere, anymore. And then—

So he’s a monster now! That’s fine, that’s, that’s good. He’s just going to...monster around, then, and not worry about Martin being slowly devoured by the Lonely (he’s going to die), or Tim being dead (Jon made him dead) Melanie trying to kill him (Jon’s going to die), or Basira refusing to trust him with a thing while she takes on the fear of the week (she’s going to die) or Georgie not wanting anything to do with him (because he'd chosen to stay where he's going to die).

It’s all….fine! It’s fine.

Jon paces in his office.

“I hope you get to stay here.”

He sits at his desk and presses his face into his hands. “I’m here, Tim,” he says quietly to the empty room. “I’m here. You’re not.”

It’s the closest thing he can offer to a funeral. Pathetic. He takes in a shaky breath.

“I’m here,” he says again, weaker. He’s a monster, and that's fine, and he’s still here, and that’s fine. But everyone else is either not here, or about to not be here, and he needs—he needs to do something with his stupid freakish monster powers, or he’s going to be the only one here.

Jon takes three minutes to cry for the people who are supposed to be here. The ones who aren’t. Then he swallows down the dry lump in his throat, and reaches for a tape recorder.

The scalpel punches straight through his lung, and pierces a pulmonary artery along with it. Jon Knows he isn’t going to heal fast enough to stop the pulmonary blood from pumping into his lung with his already jack-hammer heartbeat.

As Melanie screams, Jon breathes blood.

Melanie is shouting and Basira is shouting and Jon would very much like to be shouting but when he tries it sort of just feels like he’s inviting his lungs up his throat, where they’re absolutely not welcome.

He somehow ends up on the floor, blood meeting his lips as the shouting continues.

“Jon, she— fuck!” A door slams. “Melanie, I—dammit. Dammit.”

Jon tries not to breath as he studies the blurry ceiling. There are still far too many cobwebs.

“Jon? Shit.” Basira’s eyebrows are pulled low, a sign of distress, or maybe annoyance, or maybe neither of those things. “Are you— you’re coming back, right?”

He smiles at her in reassurance, unable to speak. Basira’s expression doesn’t change which indicates either horror or maybe resentment, or maybe just exhaustion. Jon can’t parse these sort of things out, because he’s busy dying.

“Jon?”

It occurs to him with ripping feeling that sends cold shocks through his entire body, that god, oh god, he might not wake up this time, he’s going to—

He comes to on the document storage cot, with Basira sitting next to him.

“Melanie?” he asks. It sounds a bit like “Myknee,” but Basira gets it. Anybody with that much blood on them tends to get things with minimal beating around the bush.

She’s very no nonsense, Jon muses. Probably would have made a great boss.

“Fine. Ish.” Basira says tiredly. “Guess we’ll have to see.”

“Sheh stull he?” Read: “Is she still here?”

“She’s gone, went with Georgie.” Basira sighs, rubbing her eyes. “You were dead a while.”

“I—”

“If you apologize for this,” Basira says seriously. “I’ll have to kill you."

Jon closes his mouth. Then, well. It’s been a while, so maybe it’s a little misshapen, but Jon smiles.

Basira shoves his shoulder. The blood on her hands is dry.

“Get some rest, Jon. We did one good thing.”

Jon stares at the ceiling once she's gone. Thinks of Martin sitting cross-legged on the floor next to him while his heart shrivels with terrible truths and awful visions. Thinks of the words “I guess I would want to die doing—doing something good? Something that…something that helps people.”

Jon presses his hands over his dampening face and breathes.

Jon hadn’t died when Martin first said hello and goodbye in rapid succession, and he refuses to die when he tries to approach Martin only to watch him literally vanish into thin air. It’s fine! It’s fine.

Jon slinks back to his office, reads one statement, and comes to the conclusion that he needs to chop off his finger. Melanie doesn’t seem exceedingly impressed.

“Why do you— look, maybe this sounds awful. I can’t really tell at this point. But why do you care?”

“I—what do you mean?”

Melanie raises her palms, glaring. It’s not quite at him, which is...a good sign?

“She literally killed you.”

Jon looks down at his hands, the blood on his desk, the scarless finger.

“A lot of people kill me.”

“And do a lot of people hunt you down to do it?” Melanie demands. “Do a lot of people terrorize you, and hurt you, and bury you alive? You weren’t even her only victim, and you want to, oh, just pop down into the Coffin, everything’s fixed?”

“I—it’s not that, I—”

“How can you forgive that, I mean Jesus— ”

“I don’t,” Jon snaps, standing abruptly. “I don’t. Don’t just assume I’m—it’s not about forgiving her, and don’t think—I know what she is, Melanie, better than you do. Don’t—” He doesn’t know why he’s breathing hard. “Don’t assume I don’t. ”

Melanie’s eyebrows go up, and she crosses her arms.

“Right, I...I guess you do.”

Jon sinks back into the chair. He lets the silence lie, trying to focus on his finger and not Melanie staring at him expectantly. He knows why he’s doing this, that’s— it’s enough.

“So is this just, what? You martyring yourself?”

Jon looks up at her. Something twitches in his chest.

“Sorry, that—” Melanie takes in a deep breath, closing her eyes. “Look, what’s it about, Jon. I’m not going to help you kill yourself for no good reason.”

“You can’t die in the Coffin,” Jon points out. “It won’t let you.”

Melanie pinches the bridge of her nose.

“So not the point, Jon.”

“Then what is?” Jon gestures at the coffin, the hungry wooden elephant in the room. “You want me to, to tell you why I can’t stand the thought of someone being buried like that? You want me to justify why I can’t—” He’s breathing hard again. Why is he breathing hard? He clears his throat. “I remember what it was like, Melanie, it’s not—it’s—If I have a chance to get one person out of—of that, I have to try.”

Melanie squints at him for a long moment. He shifts awkwardly, idly poking the knife with the tip of his finger and hissing when it comes away bloody. And heals instantly, because of course it does.

“So...um.” She’s been quiet a while. He draws himself up. Being a good boss is about conf—ok, he’s not fooling himself, he’s no more their boss anymore than Elias is his. He coughs. “So I’m doing it. Can you help me, or not?”

“You were dead when we dug you up,” Melanie says carefully. The next words are a question and an answer that fall like an anvil, and Jon physically cringes. “But you weren’t dead for all of it.”

“I—” He does not think of birds singing from dark trees. Nobody is coming. Nobody is coming and you’re going to die here forever. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to.

“Jon, that’s—”

“Stop.” He’s on his feet again, the word stinging from being spat. “Stop.”

Melanie, thankfully, stops.

“Right. Shit! Right.” She half turns on her heel. “Can I—look, I—ugh. I think I can help, just. Come with me.”

Having two bones from your ribcage untimely ripped is, it turns out, bad for your health.

“Hnngh,” he pants, clutching his torso. The tunnel floor is freezing, but he is absolutely not going to make it up the ladder before he dies. “I think this is one of those mysterious surgical complications all those assistants died of.”

“Yeah, well.” Melanie has an arm on his shoulder, which he thinks is very kind of her considering she hates being near him in general. She pats it up and down in a sort of hitting motion. “You’ll get better.”

“Nghhh,” Jon agrees, shutting his eyes and willing away the prickle of tears. Melanie has enough reasons to dislike him, he’s not going to give her ‘ is an ostensibly immortal monster who’s still terrified of dying’ as well.

“You will, right?” Melanie prods. He peels a single eye open. “Like, it’s a for-sure thing? I don’t know what I’m going to tell Basira if you die for good. Or,” Her eyes widen, and she stares across the tunnel in unseeing horror. “Oh god. Or Martin.”

“B’fine.” Jon mumbles. He doesn’t have long, now. The blood is pooling inside him where it shouldn't. Everything broken is healed, but his stupid immortal monster body hasn’t yet learned to dematerialize spilled blood or viscera, and he’s going to have to hack it up the hard way.

He coughs weakly, spitting on the stone ground to punctuate the point. The blood is...very dark.

“Do you want me to find some heavy drugs or something?” Melanie asks kindly. “I bet there’s some leftover from when you, you know, went behind my back and cut a bullet out of my leg. Or I can steal from Rosie’s stockpile of Xanax, knock you out til it’s done.”

“B’fine,” he says again, in case Melanie hadn’t heard. “B’over s’n.”

He clenches his freed rib tighter like the world’s worst teddy bear. Melanie hunches down closer.

“This sort of sucks,” she says after what feels like an eternity of sporadic coughing. “Can’t it like—go faster?”

He peels an eye open to squint at her. He’s not sure what emotion he conveys. He’s not sure what emotion he feels.

“Shut up, that’s not how I meant it,” Melanie says too sharply, which means she’s embarrassed. Jon struggles to keep his eye open, on her. The tunnels are starting to tunnel around him, ha-ha. Jesus. If there’s one thing he’s grateful for it’s that Helen isn’t here.

“I just mean,” Melanie says through gritted teeth. “I don’t hate you so much that I want you to die a long and agonizing death.”

Aw. He doesn’t know what to say. He rolls his eyes to the ceiling— too dark to see, even with the torches. He lets his eye drift shut.

“Can I do….anything?” Melanie says eventually. “I was serious about the drugs.”

He manages to shake his head minutely, though it sends shocks throughout his dying body.

“Don’t be a bloody martyr, Jon, I can tell it hurts. It’ll take like—”

“J’st.”

Jon swallows down the very last of his pride. Actually, he did that when he started ordering clothes from Amazon direct to the Institute, because he’s pretty sure entering a department store would send him into a panic attack from the mannequins alone. What he swallows down now is probably just viscera and bile.

“J’st dun go.”

“What?”

“Don’.” He sucks in a breath thick with broken tissue. Melanie is staring at him, he can feel it. “Don’ wanna die ‘lone.”

There’s a long silence.

Pathetic, a gleeful voice cackles. It sounds a bit like Elias. You’ve died alone before, and you’ll do it again. Melanie doesn’t owe you this, just die already—

Jon starts when a coolness settles across his forehead. Something calloused and firm, joining the weight on his shoulder.

“I—sure. Sure, Jon.”

The voice dwindles into nothing. Jon breathes beneath her hands until he does not.

You won’t die, he reminds himself as he unchains the coffin. You won’t die. You can’t. You won’t die.

It sings to him. He steps across the threshold, and descends.

“I buried you,” Daisy weeps. Jon imagines her tears going into the earth, the soil a sponge. Full circle, he thinks a little hysterically. “I buried you, I did, I did this to you.”

“Don’t worry, we can’t die here,” he says in what he wanted to be a gentle tone of voice, but comes out scraped and hollow. “It won’t let us.”

“That’s the worst part,” she pants. “We’re here forever. There’s no escape. Nobody’s coming.”

If Jon were less distracted by the crushing pressure, he might be offended.

“I— I did.”

Daisy is quiet for a long time. As quiet as you can be down here, with the heavy breathing.

“I don’t—you shouldn’t have,” she whispers. “Not for me. I did this to you. I killed you, I hurt— I hurt so many people. I—I know I deserve this.” She makes a scraped noise. “You shouldn’t be here, Jon.”

He breathes—tries to breathe—for a few seconds. Maybe-seconds. Time down here is the same as in Helen’s hallways: very, very fake.

“Maybe not.” Jon tries to clear his throat, but there’s dirt in his mouth, sand-dry. “Maybe not. But I did. It’s not about—I’m here.”

“You’re here.” Daisy squeezes his hand tighter with a sob. “You’re here.”

“How was it?” Helen leans against the door, looking down on him and blocking his view of the ceiling. It doesn’t seem quite worth it to get up yet. “Looking upon the Dark?”

“Hng. Well. I died, so.” Jon grimaces at the taste in his mouth, something flat and dusty, like he licked a rock. A particularly unfathomable and unknowable rock that wanted very much to kill him. And had succeeded. Ugh.

“I remember when you died by my hand,” Helen muses, looking all fond and reminiscent. “You do that a lot, don’t you?”

“Just one of my many talents,” he sighs, lifting his head from the ground to glance towards the door. He can’t really See anything definite after the metaphorical rock that was bashed against his brain, but he can at least Know that Basira’s still alive. Very irritated, no doubt, temporary corpses aren’t exactly reliable partners on Arctic adventures. He lets his head fall back to the ground with a sigh. Go team Archives. “Helen?”

“Yes?”

He chews the question.

“Did you die? I asked you, before but you…gave a very characteristically unsatisfactory answer.”

Helen laughs outright at that, prodding him with a very sharp shoe.

“No, Archivist,” she says with an indulgent grin. It makes him want to stand even less, his head spinning around the edges. Helen prods him again. “I Became. Are you going to get up? You look like a dead fish.”

“Thank you.” He doesn’t move, humming to himself. Basira is moving towards them, far across the building. “Is Becoming. Different from dying?”

Helen laughs again, the sound like a creaking door.

“Is aging different from self-cannibalization?”

Jon frowns at the ceiling.

“...yes. Very much so.”

“Is it? When Helen was nineteen, I wanted to be a lawyer. That didn’t work out, but she turned that part of herself into something she could use. You’re not so different, Jonathan. ” Helen tuts. “So worried about a little thing like mortality. Things like us don’t die, Archivist. We change. We Become. It’s a much better deal.”

Jon lets out a long sigh, He doesn’t think that’s quite right, but he doesn’t know enough about the philosophical conception of self in the context of monsterhood to question it.

“You’re a nightmare to talk to, you know that?” is what he settles on, gazing up at the shadowy ceiling.

“At least I don’t give people nightmares.

“That—hm. Fair.”

Jon doesn't die when Basira looks him in the eye and tells him he’s a monster. He doesn’t die when Annabelle’s statement grabs ahold of his throat and tells him what he knew all along.

Boarded up in his office—almost literally, he’d considered moving one of the shelves in front of his door in case Basira decided to kill him, but immediately given up when he’d stubbed his foot on the side of it—he lies on the ground. His office ceiling is dark and speckled, cast yellow from his desk lamp.

He does wonder, vaguely, if he can die of the Eye’s hunger. Like, die die. He’s supernaturally resurrected, why shouldn’t he be supernaturally killed?

Daisy’s a different person now. Only she isn’t—she isn’t , and that’s the point. She’d been buried, like he had, only she hadn’t died. But she’d changed. Become...different. The person she was without the Hunt.

Things like us don’t die, Archivist. We change. We Become.

So Daisy had….unBecome. Changed. Which wasn’t the same as dying, according to the personification of lies and delusion, and he wasn’t about to question her.

Could he unBecome, too? Would that kill him?

Jon sighs, pressing his palms to his temples. Whenever he tries to think about anything too existential, the Eye reminds him that no, it doesn’t care about his sad little identity issues, stop whining about what you are and go get someone to eat.

Something to eat, he reminds himself sternly. He gets the head-spinning impression that if the Eye could roll in irritation, it would. But it just stares. Prick.

Trevor does not kill Jon.

Julia does not kill Jon.

Daisy and Jon sit on the ground once they’re gone, both breathing hard for different reasons.

Daisy knows she is going to die, he realizes. She feels the certainty, the same way he does.

He doesn't know what to make of that. So he offers her this:

"Like you said. Don't listen to the blood."

And Daisy sighs, and nods, and studies the ceiling.

"Listen to the quiet."

“Would you even survive that?” Martin asks. He’s not meeting Jon’s eyes, not looking at him in a way Jon can catch a flash of brown. But that’s fine! That’s fine, because they’ll have plenty of time to look at each other once they leave this place, once they find somewhere quiet and not haunted by Jon’s many, many deaths. What a dream.

They’ll look at each other until they won’t be able to, and that seems like a fair price.

“I don’t know,” Jon says. “But I don’t really….”

Martin laughs coldly, and something turns over in Jon’s stomach. That’s…that’s fine.

“Don’t tell me you don’t care, Jon.”

Jon does not cross his arms, but moves to the edge of the desk, trying to catch Martin’s eyes.

“I—of course I care! I don’t—it’s not about that.”

“Then what’s it about, Jon.” Martin staples something, turning away. “You don’t want to die.”

“And yet,” Jon says, trying to smile. It thoroughly fails, and Jon plows forward. “Martin, think about it. We could—we could just leave. No more feeling watched, no more hurting people. No more Elias. No more finding cursed objects in your desk!”

“Jon.” Martin braces himself against the desk, staring down at it. His shoulders go up and down. “Jon you’re not hearing yourself.”

“I am —“

“Jon, you’re not—even if it works, blinding yourself won’t change everything you’re afraid of. You know that. So you come to me, to give you a reason not to face up to that. Well, you’re welcome.”

Jon doesn’t know why Martin won’t look at him. Jon doesn’t know why Martin thinks Jon wouldn’t go through with it if Martin said yes.

He trails back down to the Archives, avoiding the yellow door where the broom closet should be. It seems duller than usual. Maybe it’s the fog.

“I would have done it,” he tells a tape recorder. They really are the best listeners. The only listeners sometimes. “I—I know—it’s not about that. I’ve died all my life, obviously, I know that wouldn’t change. I just…”

He trails off. The tape recorder seems to sense that his tongue feels like a stone in his mouth, and clicks off.

Jon used to think he would die in the Archives. He wasn’t wrong. He was right more than once, actually.

Screams chase him down into the tunnels, and all Jon can think is that he thought it would only ever be him.

“How do I bring him back?”

“From out here? Impossible.”

Elias is smiling. God, did he stop to change between prison and here? There’s no way they let him wear a suit embroidered with a million golden eyes in jail.

He’s smiling just like Daisy had smiled once upon a very bad time, and Jon is probably going to die, because Elias is Jonah Magnus—because of course he is, this day is going poorly enough that that seems just about right.

“You want me to follow him?” Into the Lonely. Into the empty hell dimension where you’re forced to be alone with your own thoughts. Jon shudders.

“No, Jon,” says Elias, or Jonah, or whatever. It doesn’t matter what or who he says he is because he isn’t Martin and Jon has the capacity to care about pretty much just that condition. Not Martin says, “You want you to follow him. I simply want you to know that if you do so, you are almost certainly not coming back. To go into the Lonely willingly is as good as death.”

One day the consequence won’t be death, Jon thinks. But probably not. Not for him.

“How do I do it?”

The man who is designated not Martin smiles again. Jon resists another shudder. And the urge to shake the answer out of him, he could really do without a monologue right now.

“Are you sure? Jon, I’m telling you, you will die. And I know how much that scares you. ”

“Just tell me how the damn door works!” Jon shouts, exasperated. “Murdering your old man body would not take that long.”

“Fine, fine, very well.” He gestures all around them. “Drink it in. It’s already here, Jon. It’s already killing you. Open your mind to their route and simply...follow it.”

Anyone who says open your mind in that tone should most certainly not be listened to. Jon should keep his mind closed, and do whatever the opposite of drinking it in is. Spitting it out. Run away.

He takes one long breath and the air around him sways into something pale and shifting and unreal.

“Very good,” a voice comes from far away. Jon turns amidst the fog.

Martin is in here, somewhere. Martin is in here, dying. He can’t let Martin die. Not once, not ever.

“Are you scared, Jon?”

It doesn’t matter who asks it. Very little matters other than the fact that he is going to die, but he cannot do that before he finds Martin. But a question needs an answer.

“Always,” he breathes, and the fog swallows him whole.

Jon dies with Peter Lukas. He’s not sure if it was the power exerted, or something Peter did as a last act, but ice sweeps through him as Peter Lukas drifts apart, and yes, he’s died plenty, and he always comes back but—

But in the frozen breathless moment before his vision goes white, he knows it’s going to happen. The fear is colder than the air.

He comes to with a gasp of foggy breath, and the impression he’s frozen to the ground. The whole world is foggy, actually, and that’s very much literal. Jon almost lets his head knock back against the chilly ground. Then bolts up right.

Martin’s in here, dying, and Jon is wasting his damned time laying around being a corpse. Ridiculous.

He staggers to his feet and into the mist, shouting wordlessly through cracked lips.

“M’tin!” he shouts, though it comes out half-unintelligible. Stupid damned waste of time death-hangover, he doesn’t have time for this. “Martin, ’m here!”

“Jon.”

The world tilts and echoes. Jon reaches out, and his hand lands on freezing fabric.

“M’tin,” he says, cupping a hand to his cheek. Neither of them are warm, but it steadies something in Jon, cementing the shifting haze. “Martin, he’s, s’gone.”

“His only wish was to die alone,” a distant voice says. It sounds...cold.

“I literally don’t give a shit,” Jon slurs, clutching Martin’s sweater and squeezing his eyes shut as a wave of dizziness passes. He opens them, reaching for Martin’s chin. “Martin, please, listen to me, just, just listen—”

“You shouldn’t be here, Jon,” Martin says dully. His eyes are downcast, obscured by a flip of dark hair that ruffles in the nonexistent wind. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“When has that ever stopped me,” Jon says with a weak laugh, tilting Martin’s face up to finally look him in the eye. “Martin, please, I—”

Jon chokes, staring. Martin just looks at him, expression disinterested, mouth set. Eyes pale. Empty.

Dead.

“Martin,” Jon whispers, the word thick and unwieldy. He thinks he might be shaking. Maybe it’s the cold. “Please. I know, I know you think it’s safer here—”

“It is.” Martin sounds sure, empty eyes gazing past him. “You don’t have to be scared, here, Jon. You don’t have to be anything.”

“I’m not leaving you here to die,” Jon says, forcing the words from his teeth. “I don’t—I’m not leaving you.”

“You’ll die, too.” Martin exhales. “But it’s alright. You don’t have to be scared of it. Not here.”

I want to die doing something— something good. Martin had looked at him, when he’d said that, literal lifetimes ago. Jon remembers how cold the floor had been, how it had felt to look at that shattered glass and realize—realize everything. The weight of it all. And Martin had just said that like it was simple—simple to pick what you die for. Like it outweighed the fear.

He thinks he might understand.

Jon rests his forehead against Martin’s shoulder, conscious that every muscle in his body is suddenly horribly, helplessly, stupidly weak. The fabric smells like absolutely nothing.

I’m going to die here, he thinks. Again.

At least this time, it was doing something good.

“Please,” Jon says, lifting his head to look Martin in his odd and colorless eyes again. “Please, Martin. We need you, I—I need you.”

“No you don’t.” Martin’s voice is impassive. “Everyone’s alone, but we all survive.”

“I haven’t,” Jon points out stubbornly. He pulls back, keeping one hand on Martin’s dry, cold cheek. “I haven’t survived, not even once. And that’s fine but—but dying alone, it— it’s bad, and I’m not going to let it happen to you.”

Martin gives a sad little sigh. His eyes are still nearly white. Jon sort of wants to cry about it, sort of wants to scream about it. Maybe later. Now, Jon sets his jaw.

He says, “Martin, look at me.” And then he says, “Tell me what you see.”

Jon doesn’t die, not again. But if he had, he thinks it might have been worth it if only for the color, brown and alive, cracking through the fog.

Scotland is, predictably, beautiful.

Jon is trying to think of how best to phrase it— “It’s very nice here” versus “Scotland is as lovely as I imagined,” versus “I need you to clarify what you meant by loved, because if you meant platonically that’s absolutely fine I’m fine it’s fine but if you meant romantically do you still mean it and if so is it alright if I take your hands in mine and never let go” because they all seem fairly trite.

“Is it not opening?” Martin asks, peering around him. Jon starts, nearly dropping the key, and gives a ridiculous and probably not-very-reassuring laugh.

“No, um. Door’s stuck.” He pushes at it again, Knowing idly that there’s rust on the top hinge. Nothing sinister, or Helen-y. “I think I can—”

“If you want me to give it a go—”

“There—”

The door slams open, and Jon pitches forward. He nearly falls flat on his face over the threshold, Martin catching his arm, offering him a little upturn of his lips and this. Is just really. Not ideal.

“I’ll get the firewood,” he says loudly, and bolts back to the porch stairs. Martin watches him go, before hefting the rest of their bags slowly over the threshold.

“Getting the firewood again?” Martin asks, two days later. He’s on the hideous floral sofa, paging through what looks like a beekeeping manual. Jon pauses at the doorway guiltily.

“I—“

“You know, it might be a better excuse if we actually, you know, “ Martin flips a page idly. “Used the fireplace?”

Jon crosses his arms and studies the ceiling. Martin is either really enjoying reading about beekeeping, or grinning so broadly from harassing him because he’s bored. He’s been doing that lately in between bouts of stillness and quiet and it’s—it’s delightful. Jon sort of wants him to never stop.

“Or you know.” Martin sets down the manual. That answers that question. “Ever actually came back with more than like, a single stick?”

“Do you have a point, here?”

“I mean, I can help you workshop it, if you like?” Martin smiles. Jon’s stupid chest tugs, a knot loosening somewhere. “‘Sorry Martin, there’s an anthill I’ve become quite interested in, the Scottish ecosystem truly is something I need to go visit three times a day—“

“If I ever become fixated on an anthill, I’d like you to show a bit more alarm,” Jon says crossly. “Now. If you’ll excuse me,” Jon looks Martin directly and unwaveringly in the eye. “I’m going to get more firewood.”

And he bolts from the room with what he hopes is calm and casualness and other dignified Archivist adjectives. Martin doesn’t follow him. Jon manages to dodge the doorframe before he whacks his shoulder on it, and the door closes behind him.

He hurries across the small yard. The air is washed in a sharp, grassy scent, and Jon pulls his sweater closer around him.

Jon knows Martin thinks he comes out here to smoke. He probably would, if he’d had it in him to add a pack of cigarettes to their groceries on the first day. But really, Martin’s hand in his, he’d found it oddly easy to just let his eyes skim over the shelf.

“Bad for your health.” Jon can Know the exact intonations of Tim’s voice from outside that burnt building, all those deaths ago. “‘Those thing’s’ll kill you’ and all that.”

But no, most of what he does at the woodpile is lean heavily against the shed and catch his breath. He Knows Daisy chopped and stored it under a tarp here, and now Daisy’s probably dead and Basira might be dead soon and Tim’s and Sasha have been dead and Martin was almost, almost— and Jon would have just been here—

“Jon?”

He whirls, panting. Martin is standing there, looking stricken.

“Jon, what’s—“

“It’s—it’s fine, I—“ his throat seizes, like there’s blood crawling up it. “It’s—nothing, it’s—“

“It’s not nothing,” Martin says, offering his hands. “Jon, please—“

“Please just—stop."

He presses his hands over his eyes, as if not looking will make it any of this less true. Ridiculous. He’s died with his eyes closed. Prefers it, actually, the pretending—like he’s just falling asleep instead of looking into a doorway. Glittering eyes, spindly legs. Things he’d rather forget.

“Jon, Jon, you’re—Jon, look at me? Um. Please, I just—”

“I’m,” he pants, digging his hands into his hair instead. “I’m. I’m not.”

“What—you’re what, Jon? What can I do?”

“Nothing! We’re—” Jon clips his jaw shut, strangling down the shout that wants to fly from his chest. He is not going to yell at Martin because he can’t fucking keep it together. He looks into Martin’s eyes, the ones with dark brown veins that have been doing so well, steadily cracking the surface of dead white. “I’m. ‘m sorry. I—

“Don’t, don’t apologize, Jon, it’s— We just—jesus, considering—well, everything, it’s okay to be a little—you know. But you don’t have to come out here to have a panic attack all by yourself, that’s—”

Jon sucks in a breath, trying in vain to cover his eyes again, but he can’t stop fresh tears from squeezing from his eyes.

“Jon, hey, hey, don’t—can, can you tell me what’s, what’s wrong?” Martin’s voice is cautious, closer. “I mean, like the obvious, duh, but—I mean, I—it’s alright, Jon, we’ll be alright out here, okay?”

“We won’t, though, ” Jon wheezes out in a sob. He can’t really, well, see, but he’s pretty sure Martin is staring at him in horror. “We, we’re never alright, Martin, you don’t—I’m so, fucking, scared Martin, I can’t, I can’t—it’s ridiculous, but I can’t feel, I— I can’t think of anything else, and it’s driving me— “

“Hey, hey, it’s— it’s not ridiculous, Jon,” Martin’s hands are heavy on Jon’s shoulders, his gaze resting on Jon’s face. “Jon, that’s like—being scared? Right now? In the middle of literally all of this? That’s like, the least ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard you say. ”

Jon laughs, thick and watery, and Martin smiles in a panicked sort of way.

“Yeah, it’s—we’re probably the safest we’ve been in ages out here, just us and those cows, and, and I’m not going to let—“ Martin exhales sharply, and when he speaks again his voice is…less distant. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

Jon just shakes his head, trying and failing miserably to smile.

“That’s not— you can’t stop it, Martin,” he says, throat constricting. “I’m— I keep dying. I keep coming back . I shouldn’t be— I shouldn’t be scared anymore, I shouldn’t, shouldn’t—“

He heaves in a breath strung tight, staring up at the stupidly beautiful Scotland sky. Another. He can’t fill his lungs. It doesn’t even matter. His heart pumps uselessly, meaninglessly.

It’s all one moment. Only Jon’s moment is forever going in circles, death’s revolving door, spinning and spinning and terrifying every time. Wrong, every time. He’s known that, from the very beginning.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” he whispers shakily. Martin is blurry, a lovely image with an eraser dragged across it. Martin is here, and something is going to happen, and then he won’t be here. But Jon will. “I’m not—I shouldn’t be here, Martin,” he says, and there’s no way to describe the terror welling up inside him other than it hurts. “I shouldn’t— I shouldn’t—“

It hurts, being like this. Gerry had scared the living hell out of him. A half-dead face, staring at him with a twitch of pain in his brow. One foot in the grave, just like Jon.

“Jon, please, come inside I’ll, I’ll get you some water, and we—we can work this out—“

“No, we can’t, we—we—“

“Jon—“

What do you do?

What do you do when you know the first and final truth? When it fills you up? When there’s no more room for the fear inside of you?

What do you do?

Jon begins to laugh.

It rises from somewhere deep within him, layered beneath topsoil and gummied blood, warbling out of him until it spills from his mouth into the air. Jon laughs and laughs and laughs, and thinks he might be scaring Martin, and that just makes him laugh more. His whole body is shaking itself apart as he laughs—he might just fall to pieces, here by a woodpile in Scotland, and that is just so —he wheezes, staggering a bit, and Martin’s speaking, and he can’t—he’s died! He’s died every time, just been fucking murdered by almost everyone he’s met in the past two years. And then—and then he came back! It’s funny!

Jon chokes on what almost becomes a scream. There are tears streaming down his face, burning hot in his throat.

Jon wants to laugh until he dies. He wants to laugh until this wretched thing inside of him is dead, too—the one that scratches and sings and strings too-tight wires through his broken ribcage.

Of course. He doesn’t.

No. What he does, is lean forward into Martin, wheezing and still shaking with something that isn’t quite laughter anymore.

Two hands press softly against his back.

“It’s okay,” Martin whispers. His voice is thick as mud. “I’m here. You’re here. We’re here, and—We’re here. I know you’re scared. But I love you.”

“That’s,” Jon whispers. Oh. He wishes he could—could feel the words, could feel anything beyond heavy, dead, terror. He shakes his head into Martin’s shoulder. “That, that doesn’t—that can’t stop it, Martin. There’s, nothing. Nothing you can do.”

“I—I know.” The hands on his back don’t falter as they smooth Jon’s shirt up to his collar. “But if—if I die tomorrow, it’s still true. It won’t go away, even if I do. And…if you die tomorrow, I’ll wait here until you come back. ”

Jon chokes out a sob.

“And what if I don’t? If it’s—what if next time is—what if it’s the ending?”

Martin exhales, long and slow. Then he tilts Jon’s chin up enough that he can rest his forehead against Jon’s. That Jon can see the tears on Martin’s face, mirroring his own.

“I’ll still love you after the ending.”

Jonah Magnus wants to live. That’s it.

It’s stupidly, hilariously simple a motivation. Jon would laugh, if his voice were his own. He would scream. Jonah doesn’t want to die, so he’s done all this scheming and murdering and ominous lurking to use Jon to make the world die instead.

It’s pathetic. It’s ridiculous. It makes perfect sense.

The words pour out of him, and Jon might hate the sliver of himself that understands, but can’t stop it from understanding. Jonah fucking Magnus, near-omniscient avatar of the Eye, petrified of death to the point of dooming the literal world over it. Gripped by fear of it, strung through with the inevitability, the horror of annihilation.

It makes complete and sickening sense. Jon understands. Jon understands in a way he’s never understood another person before. And it makes him want to throw up.

“And when you first died at Jane Prentiss’ hand, I thought it was over,” Jon is saying. “I’d waited a fraction of a second too long— I was too eager to get the Mark right, to make you feel the fear, all the way down to the bone. They wheeled your body out and frankly, I was furious with myself. Ah well, I thought, if you hadn’t survived one encounter, you were unlikely to survive all fourteen. Starting over wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t a total loss. Both of your remaining assistants at that point had their own Marks, after all.”

Jon doesn’t want to think about Martin being forced into this. Tim. Jon had died with every encounter, just had the misfortune of being able to come back.

Lucky he doesn’t have much time to think of anything, because Jonah is still talking.

“But then, wonder of wonders, you’d been Marked by the End without me even noticing. Furthermore, it was in such a way that you that I knew this was truly meant to be. What better quality for an Archive to have, than to be unable to be destroyed? Unable to die? I must admit, Jon, I’m more than a little jealous of your peculiar relationship with Terminus, but it does serve its purpose. And now you’ll serve yours.”

Jealous.

If Jon lives through this—which he knows he won’t, but that’s never mattered—he’s going to find Jonah Magnus, and he’s going to throttle him. Jealous.

“Now.”

Jealous of every shaking moment of irrepressible terror. Of every singular understanding that this is the end of me.

“Repeat after me.”

Jon’s mouth moves, and tears burn their way down his face, and all he can think is that if Jonah’s so jealous he can have it—he can have the last breaths and the parched lungs and the waking up with a fucking death-hangover and the dying alone, and tears are dripping from Jon’s chin because he really, really wishes Martin were here —

Jon reaches the end of the page, mouth bleeding static and metal. He tries to close his eyes. It won’t let him.

“I OPEN THE DOOR!”

Something in him cracks. Something in him creaks. Something crawls beneath his skin, chokes up his throat, blinds him, falls through him, twists in him. Something leaves him, hiding from the terrible echo that weaves across his skin, burning like a brand, the agony hunting down every scrap of his living mind and ripping into it until it bleeds through his very being.

Jon, of course, dies.

Jon exhales. The air is soft and heavy and polluted.

He takes in another drag with the next breath, swallowing down clean wind marred with smoke. It’s quiet, but for the birds. He wonders when Martin will be back.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

Jon starts at the voice, nearly dropping the cigarette. A man is standing at the bottom of the safehouse porch, frowning up at him.

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re….you’re not supposed to be here.”

“Um.” Jon takes a nervous drag he hopes doesn’t look nervous as he tries to come up with a passable response. Birds are singing from the late evening fields, the sun low and dim against the darkening sky. Nightjars, he thinks, have a very distinct song. He settles on a convincing reply. “Yes, I am.”

“Er. No, you’re...really not.” The man sounds apologetic.

Jon inhales more smoke in response, hoping Martin won’t get home before he manages to finish this cigarette. He hasn’t smoked the whole time at the safehouse, and he doubts Martin would be pleased he is now. He’s not even sure where he got the cigarette.

At the same time, it’d be nice for Martin to show up now, usher away this strange and impolite man. Who is this guy? Walking around, telling people they’re not supposed to be in their perfectly comfortable safehouses while on the run? Who does that?

“Jon,” the man says, and Jon’s eyes snap to him. He steps back, raising his hands with an awkward smile. “Sorry, I just—”

“Please tell me you know my name from Martin, or that infernal teenager from the convenience store,” Jon says, stubbing out the cigarette with a vengeance against the porch. It doesn’t leave a mark. He stands, stretching and glaring down at the man with as much force he can muster, though he’s painfully aware he’s drowning in Martin’s sweatshirt unironically featuring an actual kitten on it. It’s got sunglasses. Jon glowers. “I’m really not in the mood to die, right now.”

“Look, I’m not—” the man looks exhausted. “I’m really just trying to...I don’t even know, actually. It seemed like a good idea at the time? I should go.”

“No, you should tell me who you are, and how you know my name,” Jon says, irritated. “If you don’t tell me, I’m just going to ask, and last time that happened I blew somebody up.”

Accidentally, but he doesn't need to know that.

“Okay!” the man turns on his heel, waving behind him a little frantically. “Nevermind! Bye Archivist!”

Jon watches him go. Stilted birdsong fills his ears. A dry taste like poplarwood settles at the back of his throat.

“Wait. Wait, I— wait!”

Jon hurries off the porch. It falls away behind him—stupid vanishing porches, Martin always did say the whole cottage was a fixer-upper—and Jon reaches the damp grass before the man stops. The nightjars sing louder, perfectly in tune.

“I really don’t want to start anything,” the man says, hands still raised. “I’m not good in fights, that’s really not my thing—”

“I don’t— I don’t want to fight you, Oliver.” Jon frowns as the name falls into place on his tongue. “Oliver. Oliver...Banks. You...what are you doing here? How did you find me?”

“Jon,” says Oliver, speaking very slowly. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Jon laughs a little at that. His mouth is dry, tongue weighed down with cigarette smoke and coffinwood splinters.

“I don’t think I ever was,” says Jon, still laughing a bit. “Isn’t that the point? Isn’t that why it kept happening? If you mess up once, there’s always the chance that next time it will stick.”

Oliver’s lips twitch.

“Sort of thought you’d know better than me. Beholding types are supposed to know things, aren’t they? What do you think?”

Jon picks at his sleeve. He wishes he hadn’t stubbed out that cigarette. His mouth is so dry. It tastes like a grave, and he would know.

“I think I ended the world.” He sighs through his next thought, looking off into the distance. It’s indistinct, like blotches on a painting. Like shapes in a dream. Something in his chest is pulled very tight, but he still says the words. “I opened a door, and I think I ended the world. And then I think….I think I ended, too. I suppose that’s why you’re here, isn’t it.”

Oliver says nothing, studying him.

“About time,” Jon says, picking at his sleeve again. He laughs again, the noise high and stringy. “Hope Martin won’t, um, won’t miss me too much. I don’t—kind of bad timing, I suppose? I was—I don’t think I was ready, not this time, I don’t—if this is the last time, I didn’t, didn’t really got the chance to tell him—”

“Jon,” Oliver interrupts, very kindly. “You’re not supposed to be here .”

It takes a second. Though seconds don’t matter, here.

“Oh.” He turns. The safehouse solidifies the second he lays eyes on it, the murky little details appearing as soon as he remembers them. The roof looks fine, until he recalls Martin complaining about missing shingles. He scowls as a dozen shingles vanish into thin air. Then he turns back to Oliver. “Oh. I can leave, then? How?”

Oliver shrugs.

“Usually I just wake up. But you’re not supposed to be here, so I sort of...have no clue?”

Jon looks at him for a second. Oliver rubs his neck.

“I’m not like, a psychopomp, sorry. I don’t think this place is even for that, anyway. But you could just...you Know things, don’t you?”

“Only at the most inconvenient times,” Jon admits, imagining a lit cigarette in his hand. Nothing materializes. He imagines his mouth to be less dry than it is. Still, nothing materializes. He turns, trailing back to the cabin porch. Oliver inexplicably follows him.

“That’s...rough,” Oliver offers, tapping his hands together. Jon nods, easing himself down to the steps.

“I suppose I should, though. Wake up. I ended the world, I should probably...deal with that.”

“Did you?” Oliver looks genuinely surprised. “I hadn’t noticed. Wait, is that like, a metaphor?”

“No, it was this whole—ugh. Thing. Jonah Magnus, the Watcher’s Crown, apparently, getting Marked….” Jon sighs, scrubbing his face. “God, I knew dying that many times wasn’t normal.”

“Can I...ask you something, Archivist?”

What a novelty. Jon eyes him—that’s a joke— and waves an acquiescent hand.

“Can’t promise I’ll Know the answer.”

Oliver hesitates for only a second.

“Right. Well. You’re not supposed to be here—”

“You’ve said.”

“Right, er, sorry. But it’s just...you’ve never been here before. But in the hospital, you...You were, er. You were very complicated to look at.”

Jon surveys him for a second.

“I’m flattered, Oliver, but I have a boyfriend.“

“Er. Right, sorry, I wasn’t—”

“He has very nice eyes.”

“That’s—”

“I love him very much.”

“That’s good! That’s good. I, er—” Oliver taps his hands together, looking like he’d rather be elsewhere. Jon knows the feeling. “Just! The roots, before. They were tangled all over you, like...like I can’t even describe. But now they’re just...gone.”

“Gone?”

“All of them. I followed them here, and then then something happened, and now they’re gone. And now you’re here.”

That’s...that’s….

Jon doesn’t speak, just leans forward to brace his elbows against his knees and stare into the faded heather. The nightjars are deafening now, but he knows if he looked and Looked he wouldn't be able to find any. Lich fowle, corpse-birds, wheeling over gorse and fen. They sing over houses with death in them. They sing and you do not forget the song for the rest of your life.

Jon very abruptly wishes for a sip of tea. Martin’s tea. Not a whole cup, just...just a sip, so he wouldn’t have to taste flat and creaking poplarwood. Something to chase away the bitterness, the dryness.

“That wasn’t a question,” Jon points out eventually. “Why follow my vein? What are you doing here, Oliver?”

“That was my question.” Oliver taps his hands together again, brows low as he studies Jon. “What are you doing here, Jon? You’re not— ”

“I’m not supposed to be here,” Jon agrees, standing. “I said, I don’t know. It’s your patron, you tell me.”

“Not just mine, Jon.” Oliver sounds sad. “You know that.”

Jon steps back.

“I— what?” He scoffs, very much wishing he had a cigarette to wave in indignation. Still, nothing materializes. Stupid useless death dream dimension. “I don’t serve the End. I never—I’m the Archivist, not, not the damned Mortician.”

Oliver shrugs.

“I’m a death prophet, and a serial identity thief. You can be two things. I don’t think you have a title, or anything, Terminus doesn’t care about things like that as much as the Eye. Labels don’t really mean much when they’re not going to last.”

“But I don’t….I haven’t fed on anyone for the End,” Jon says, stomach twisting at the thought. “I don’t kill people, or, or trade their lives for mine. Um. Do I? I’ve always been like this. You know, since a spider ate me. I don’t know why, I just...am.”

“And that must be quite terrifying for you,” Oliver says mildly. “Torturous, even. An awful thing, keeping a soul from death.”

Jon swallows dry air. The nightjars scream. There’s a string pulled tight through his chest.

“How do I leave?” he asks in a croak. “I don’t want to be here any—I want to leave.”

Oliver taps his hands together, casting his eyes to the sky.

“Depends on which door you want to take, I guess. They’re both open, now. Is that what you meant, earlier?”

“I...I opened the door, yes,” Jon whispers. He sort of wants to start crying, but it seems rude to waste Oliver’s time. He just needs to wake up, wake up, get to Martin, then he can...cry for days about ending the world. About killing it. About killing everyone, you killed everyone, they died they died — He takes a deep breath, ignoring the chanting guilt. Talk now, cry later. It’s a good plan.

“But that’s not—I opened it for all of them,” he continues, waving to the purple sky. “They’re all here now, they’re all supposed to be here. I was Marked by all of them. I opened the door.”

Oliver looks at him strangely.

“I mean, you did open a door,” he says, gesturing uncertainly. “Er. But I don’t think you could—I mean. It’s your door. It’s the End’s door.”

“I— what?” Jon goggles at Oliver, well and truly lost. “What? I didn’t— that wasn’t an End ritual, Terminus doesn’t— what?”

Oliver sighs.

“Jon, I don’t really—I don’t know things, like you do? But I know our patron. And for some reason, whatever you did, whatever door you opened...the only thing going through it is you. If, er, you want to. Terminus doesn’t care for rituals. There’s no point. It’s all one moment.”

Jon presses his palms to his eyes. The moment that you die will feel exactly the same as this one. He’s so thirsty, he thinks he might die. Ha.

“So the door,” he says. Licks his lips. “The door is for me. The other door is for me, too. But what, what about the Marks? What about the ritual? What about the apocalypse?”

Oliver tilts his head.

“The world didn’t...end, ‘sfar as I can tell? Still the same old. But you’re not...er, Marks, you say?”

“Not a physical mark, necessarily. I needed to...to feel the fear,” Jon quotes numbly. “all the way down to the bone’.”

Oliver just looks at him. The tautness in Jon’s chest worsens.

“But that’s not right,” says Jon. Oh. Oh. Of course. Of course. He traces a finger across the seam on his throat with a warped finger. Neither hurt anymore. Just scars. “I was only ever afraid of one thing.”

Oliver smiles sadly.

“You’re not supposed to be here, Jon,” says Oliver. “You can go now, if you like.”

Jon lowers his hand.

“How.”

“Well, last time we talked—er, I talked, I s’pose— I gave you a choice.” Oliver shrugs, glancing towards the open grass. “Not to be repetitive…there are two doors. Not the same ones, but you’ve still got to pick.”

Jon laughs little. It sounds like a sob.

“Seems a bit...”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s a bit cliched.” Oliver scratches his neck, looking sheepish. “But to be fair, this is technically a dream, so. Why make it complicated, right?”

“Right.”

They stand there for a moment. The nightjars are still singing, still unnaturally melodic. You hear them, and you do not forget.

“Will you...tell me?”

Oliver looks up from where he’d been scuffing the dirt.

“The doors.” Jon gestures awkwardly. “The choice. Not a statement, good lord, I’ve had enough of those. Just…”

“Commentary,” Oliver offers, nodding. “Er, sure. Well. There’s two doors. Just there. Go on, look.”

Jon’s gaze is inexorably pulled, away from Oliver, towards the open field. The sky is purple and wide and deep and empty. Vast, Jon thinks to himself, mouth twitching.

He steps towards it. Grass brushes his knees.

“They’re both open, now.” Oliver’s voice follows him, as if he were walking next to him and not watching from the dematerializing safehouse. “I don’t think they were before. I don’t think they will be again. Not both of them. Not for you.”

Jon keeps walking. The grass around him kisses his palms, brushing over them as he steps through furrows of heather. His mouth is dry.

“One of them will always be there. Not a choice. But it is the point that is and will always be, and that we will all pass the threshold of, one day or another.”

“What’s across it?” Jon asks into the dark. Something is wheeling over his head, something he can’t see. Something is standing in front of him, something he can’t see. It is heavy and patient and Jon furrows his brow at it. “Can I...open it? Look through?”

Oliver pauses.

“Er, I know I did just say threshold, and I was saying earlier you—look, it’s not really a door. But it— well it’s still a dream, but the metaphor sort of—”

“It doesn’t— it doesn’t matter if it’s not a door! It can be a door, or not a door. I—” Jon runs his hands through his hair, almost laughing in frustration. “I’m sick of doors! I think it’s always been a door, for me, it doesn't— I just want to know what happens if I choose it.”

“You won’t be afraid anymore,” says Oliver. “If you step through the first door, you won’t feed our patron any longer. You won’t feed anything, anymore.“

“I’ll be dead, then.” Jon stares at the something in front of him, just an arms’ length away, sitting calmly amongst the tall grass. “For good.”

“You won’t be afraid anymore,” Oliver repeats.

“And you said you weren’t a psychopomp,” Jon says, sighing. He turns. It doesn't matter where, but the light changes. Still dark, but grayer somehow. “Alright. And the other door?”

“The other door is what you think it is,” Oliver says, and he can picture him tapping his hands together in front of the house that isn’t there. “You step through it, and you’re afraid again. All the fear and the monsters and the missing and the heartbeak. The world isn’t over, Jon, but it’s still the world.”

“It sounds like you have a preference which I choose,” Jon says, and it feels like he should be more irritable about it, but really he’s just sort of hurt. “Didn’t think you wanted me dead, Oliver.”

“I don’t want anything,” says Oliver, and he sounds tired. “Not when it comes to this. It will happen, one way or another. But I just— I just want you to know. You deserve to know.”

The ground is becoming infirm, the grass giving way to soft peat and pools of brackish water. Jon pauses at the edge of one that stretches out before him, reflecting flickering shadows that make no noise. The highland skies are swathed in stars, the blotted shapes easy to spot as they wheel above him.

“This door’s...weird. It will change you. You’ll become…”

Things like us don’t die. We change. We Become.

“Something else?”

“No,” Oliver says, sounding surprised. “No, not that kind of change. Just different. You’ve died, but you’re not dead. I should hope you know the difference, by now.”

“I’ll wake up, though. I’ll be...I’ll be living.”

Oliver says nothing.

Jon considers the pool. Parched air passes though his lips, and he presses them together. There’s an empty space where his reflection should be.

He crouches.

“Are you sure?”

Jon doesn’t bother with a response. He cups his hands, lowering them until they break the speckled, glinting surface and water spills in. It’s cooler than the air, enough to send a shiver through him.

Jon inclines his head, and drinks deeply.

The air is cool and bright and shot through with dust.

Oh, fantastic, Jon blinks up at the cracked plaster ceiling. I’m alive.

Alive and extremely comfortable. Martin must have moved him to the bed at some point, because Martin is a considerate angel of a man, and Jon needs to find him immediately and inform him of some things he’s forgotten to say.

Not forgotten. Been too scared to say.

He only staggers a bit, rising from the bed, squinting out the glimmering morning. Morning? It feels like morning, which means he’s been dead for a while. Martin’s not going to be happy.

There’s a chime of glass from the kitchen. Perfect. Drowning himself in tea sounds ideal right about now.

“Did you do my hair while I was dead?” he stumbles into the morning-lit kitchen, fiddling with the neat braid. “It’s nice, I just— “

Something shatters. Ceramic skids along the floor, and Jon steps back with a frown.

“Careful, I’m not wearing any…” his eyes drift to Martin. “Shoes, um. Martin? Is everything...”

Martin’s hair is disheveled, his eyes bruised and puffy. Jon stares. Martin stares back. Then points. Jon points back, confused.

“You bastard!”

“I—what?”

“You died!”

“Yes, I— I do that, we’ve established, I—”

“It’s been five days!”

“Martin, I— what?”

Jon doesn't have time to think too hard about that— five days dead? Really? To be fair his record is six months, but that’s with a giant evil Eye keeping him dead, and—

His face is suddenly buried in Martin’s chest, two bands wrapped around him like iron.

He taps Martin’s arms frantically, caught off-guard. Martin releases him immediately, keeping him at arm's length but staring at him like he’s just come back from the— well.

“I— sorry.” Jon rubs his neck. “I didn’t— um. Five days, really?”

“Please don’t do that again,” Martin says, and it’s a harsh whisper, and Jon looks up and oh god, Martin’s crying, now Jon has to cry too. Asphyxiation by jumper be damned, Jon drags Martin close again, pressing his nose into the cotton at his shoulder.

“I didn’t mean to,” he says back, honestly. “I— I swear, I wouldn’t do that to you on purpose.”

“I know, I know, I—” Martin pulls back enough to press his forehead to Jon’s. Jon goes cross-eyed for a moment, trying to look into his eyes, before giving up and raising his head to press his lips precisely between them, right over the furrowed little line. Martin holds him closer, tears falling freely. “Please, just—it’s been—I love you. I should have said it more, I— so much, and, and I came home, and you were just— just gone. You were gone, and, and, I read the, the statement, and I thought you were never going to wake up—”

Martin cuts himself off with a choke. Jon closes his eyes. He feels the fear. He feels the missing.

“I love you too,” he says quietly, before he loses his nerve. “I—I do.”

“Thank you for waking up,” Martin whispers into his hair. “Thank you for coming back.”

They stand there. They are alive.

“I think I can die, now,” Jon eventually says in response. Martin goes tense. He opens his eyes, adjusting them so he can wrap his arms around Martin and still lay his head against his shoulder. “I’m sorry. Probably not the time. I just thought you should know.”

Martin is quiet for a long time. They stand there, a tableau of a slow dance. Martin wipes his face, sniffing and clearing his throat.

“Okay. That’s—that’s different. Not surprising, I figure— well I read Jonah’s statement. And you were, you know, dead for five days. Something had to have changed.”

“Does—Martin, I can die now. No, that’s not—I can be dead now.”

Martin snorts, and it’s only a little watery.

“Yeah? Welcome to the club.”

“I’m serious!”

“So am I,” Martin says, pressing a thumb beneath Jon’s eye. “Still brown. Congratulations.”

“Shut up,” Jon grumbles, pressing his face against Martin’s shoulder. “This doesn’t scare you?”

“Of course it scares me, Jon! But you’re—you’re alive right now, and I—I sort of can’t think beyond that? Sorry, I haven’t really slept in a bit. It's been a—been a bad five days.“ He peers down at Jon, mouth pressed thin. “Does it scare you?”

Jon thinks of rubber bands and wires and ropes, snapping inside him. Of being torn and eaten and stabbed and shattered and choked and frozen.

He thinks of the calm, patient weight of the door he could not see. Of the cold water of the door he drank from.

“Yes.” He furrows his brow, staring out the window above the sink. “Yes, very much.”

After a pause, Martin presses a kiss against his temple.

“It’s okay if you are,” he says quietly. Jon turns to meet his gaze. Flecks of pale, amidst deep dark brown. Martin smiles sheepishly. “I mean. I think that’s part of it, right? I am. Scared of, of dying. Of you dying. Losing, all of this.”

“We almost did.” Jon wants to ask where Jonah’s statement is. Wants to find out if it would have worked, with anyone else. “We could have. I mean, the whole world could have.”

“But we didn’t.”

Jon exhales. The safehouse is quiet, but for the two of them breathing, the rustle of fabric in Jon’s ear as he lays his head against Martin’s shoulder again. They stand there for a long time, and Martin traces shapes over Jon's back that feel like letters.

This will end, Jon thinks. He feels the heartbreak.

“I think I could die just like this,” Jon says eventually, and Martin barks out a bright laugh as he holds him closer.

“Don’t you dare.”

One day Jonathan Sims will End. He will not come back. He knows this. He feels the fear, woven into him. He feels the missing, for people who should be here, who are not. The End is the first truth, the last truth. But it really isn't the only truth, and it really never was.

There are other ones, smaller ones, kinder ones. The sky changes color throughout the day. Water tastes sweetest to parched lips. Some birds sing at night.

Jon holds Martin close and knows it's another truth that he loves him. That Martin holds him close and loves him back. The End will find him, one day, for good. It will end these things. But it will not make them untrue.

Notes:

and that's all, folks.
thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it, or otherwise found something you liked. catch me at prismatic-et-al or drop me a comment - I really would love to hear your thoughts.

Actions

Kudos

OliveTea, L0ve__Bug, SilverHeart9616, chrysanth0s, def_ace_ing_it, CharonsDanake, Duckin_around, 75hearts, HighlyConfused, asleep_probably, SkellyVoid, ChpNinjaChick, Velossoraptor, entryleveldysfunction, lotsalight, Cosmically_Online, Rainbow_Sneks, Creanimation, FullyShavedPoodle, aromatic_acetate, A_Tired_Ace, NotUntilTomorrow, Kodokuna, wizardlover, notus_storm, ao3_archive_rat, RandomFruit, Blacknight610, Choosing_A_Name_Is_Hard, JungleJelly, CorneliaWonder, Quarg, momofishrules, Riverivy, PersianPenName, mauu_sie, Inkinhart, will_woodnt, Jxst_s0meone, lukegodbaby, sOMeOnE_MUncHEd_MY_CHerrIoS, CardaMommie333, Weirdperson19, Magdelyn, tarathavi, Tea_crumbs, YippeeHowAreU, pumpkinheaded, Mongfind_Minecraft, suckstobeme, and 4002 more users as well as 915 guests left kudos on this work!

Archive of Our Own

Actions

Work Header