Jon comes back from America... wrong.
Martin stares. Those eyes have changed from that soft brown that Martin had quietly grown fond of - the subject of his poetry more than once, in fact - into something that glows and glimmers with heat and light drawn into a singular focus, like light passing through the facet of an unworldly lens. There is no name for the colour, because it hurts to look, Martin is sure his retinas would have been burned out by now if not for the fact that Jon's hair often falls over his fringe to cover the face. Even that is the wrong texture. It's the mirage of ash, silver-streaked like- like web, and Jon is older and tired and empty in a way that Martin aches to even exist in the same room as.
Tim doesn't even think its Jon anymore.
But Martin tells himself it is. Because that- because Jon still accepts the cups of tea that Martin presses into his hands, takes it with the same amount of ungodly sugar each time, and offers that same tentative smile that Martin has learnt to know the shape of. Even if it is a pretense, even if it is a lie... he can't meet Jon's eyes anymore. Jon's smile is all teeth.
It hurts Martin. And it wounds Tim, although he's doing a fantastic job at acting otherwise.
Coincidentally, Melanie and Basira barely miss Jon's presence every single time. Realistically one would go for the phone camera, the other most likely reaching for the gun. Yeah, Martin knows exactly how well that would go.
There is hardness on Tim's face. He alternates between simmering with rage or outright stalking out of the room when Jon dares to brush past the threshold from the office to the rest of the Archives. He glares and flinches, trembling, strung out and seething and despaired and furious and shattered, emotions that they can all taste swinging as unevenly as a pendulum. It's a fuse. And Martin's terrified of the trigger, so much so he flits between them. Bitterly, always the mediator, always the peacekeeper.
Mum showed him exactly how malleable anger is. How flexible it can be.
(There's an empty space where Sasha had once been.)
It makes working in the Archives an act of walking the tightrope - and- and sometimes that rope is around Martin's neck - but he thinks he's become very adept at maintaining that balance.
He hears Jon's voice, like a background drone. The office walls are thin. An illusion of safety and privacy. The click of the tape recorder as subtle but unmistakable, the constant press of awareness like a blade to Martin's throat. He listens, helpless. Drawn between a tide, he strains to hear, but it's like he's underwater and the words are there swimming around in his skull but he just doesn't understand what it means.
The wrong door opens. Jon's door.
Oh.
Martin stares, stricken.
That’s new. He is unable to tear his gaze away from the multitude of eyes that Jon’s shadow now casts, over his face, against the wall, highlighted over skin and air and breath, tinting the dark streaks of hair in its warm glow. He senses Tim go absolutely rigid next to him; he hears the hard scrape of nails against wood and knows that Tim is back to gripping his desk, knuckles white with strain.
Jon is not Jon. More silhouette than human.
But all the while, Martin thinks he just looks at them with those sad, sad eyes.
Tim is on alert next to him, face tightening and knuckles pale with strain. He hisses, “What the fuck-“
“Jon.” Martin says, reaching out. The moment seems impossibly fragile, like glass, like ice.
It's stupid, thinking that he- he matters enough that Jon will reach back and grip his hand, crawl back if he has to. Martin sees too much. He sees too little. He stares uncomprehendingly at the blood. At the bout of a dark tide soaked visible through the worn seams of Jon's clothes. Glistening like tears in the corner of an eye, in the pale mournful lights of the Archive. It spills from the open edge of a split throat, from the dime-shaped holes trailing like bruises down his neck.
With every passing second, Jon looks more and more inhuman.
His skin is barely put together, the scars illuminated by that strange harsh light, the same that spills out from his eyes, the glow of power bleeding out into the white, until his pupils have become so dark and hollow that they appear completely black. The light bends and twists and trick reality into a mirage - a halo of bloodied scleras and corneas of every conceivable colour encircling that right eye like the coronet of a crown. Like shackles, like ascension.
Martin is vivisected by the paralysis of being seen down to every ugly scrap. The sensation of being watched, of being known and flayed alive, ripping upwards through the ocean's worth of a life the thoughts and secrets and memory as the hooks and nets trawl and pile the cacophony of consonants behind his scraped teeth. The crawling mass of something so deep and primal that it clogs its lungs, and he cannot think, cannot breathe-
He's more surprised that Tim even has the breath to- to howl.
The reaction is more of an electric shock. Jon lets go immediately, and the release of pressure is like the scream of a radio cord as it is abruptly yanked from the sockets.
“Don’t.” Jon’s voice is harsh and stilted, almost a growl. There is a tremor in his limbs. “Don’t look at me."
And then, finally, to his unending horror, Martin broke. The small gasp that left his lips could have been mistaken for a sob, as his body succumbed to what it had been trying to do ever since the start of this whole fucking nightmare. To his mortification, there are tears cold and wet sliding from the corner of his eyes. He slid to his knees and then further down, his arms resting over his knees as he held his head in his hands.
Tim crouches next to him, hand hovering, the pale of his face gleaming with those same wet tracks.
"You fucking monster," Tim snarls, "Stay the fuck away from us."
"Jon." Martin chokes, "What are you doing?"
The split second of lucidity in Jon's eyes. Wrapped in pity and determination. His chest does not rise and fall, the posture is wrong in the same way his bones have fused into place. He hesitates, then joins them on the ground, folding cross-legged. The tape recorder clicks, but not before the screech of a Geiger counter. "Statement of the Archive, regarding an... undoing."
"Near to the 200th anniversary of both his birth and death, there was Jonah Magnus." Jon continues. "I do so hope he'll forgive me this self-indulgence, but I have suffered so very much at his hands, and well, isn't it fitting for the work of one's hands to surpass the potter. It is rare that a man so close to his god would deign to bow his head to another, to allow the schemes and machinations of the Web so close to his Temple.
Why does a man seek to destroy the world?
He lies to himself, for immortality and power. It is a truth befitting of the Spiral in all its curious, complicated nature. It is simply because he is afraid. First, the fear of that broken world, of being a mote of dust subjected to the whims and satiation of those Beings beyond. And then fear of his own insignificance. The fear of his own inevitable death. The cruel fear of knowing what came beyond.
Sometimes its not always the thing that you fear that claims you. Sometimes it is because you are running from something else.
I know that fear. It is words scrawled upon the parchment of my bones, and it was in every breath I have taken as Jonathan Sims. And it has shaped me far beyond Jonah Magnus's wildest imaginations.
He once named himself the king of a ruined world.
Yet I am its vessel. I have brought these Beings into its final apotheosis, and so the head that the crown fits is so rightfully mind, isn't it?
Hmm. Are you running, Elias?
No, watch that door. It's smiling. Michael never did like you. Helen despised you.
Jonah Magnus strung his creation, wound it in puppet strings. It was a charitable way to put it, to tell myself and the others that everything we did was to preserve the world. Through desecration, with webs and lies and barbs and writhing worms. But he did not ponder upon those contradictions, simply accepted it for truth. The oppression against free fall. Sending the Known into the Unknowing. The thrill of the hunt, collared. Lies wrapped in truth swallowed in more lies.
Now... what is the world that Jonah Magnus imagines?
It is a feeding ground. Like cattle herded through the slaughter house, like the butcher delighting in his pastures. The Distortion, with all its insanity and twists and fractal glass laughs. The Web with its plays and puppets and its grandest show preparing for a dethronement even as it applauds those dead empty echoes of a throne. The blood of the Slaughter, the evisceration of the Flesh, the pulse of the Hunt. The choke of the Buried, the squirming hunger of the Corruption. The absolution of the Dark, the candle-light turned inferno of the Desolation. The lapping waves of the Lonely, the endlessness of the Vast. The sawdust of the Stranger.
You forget the inevitability of the End.
I have lived those eons in your stead. I have felt every cell on this earth live and die and recycle. This story is Known, and it is my offering to the Beholding. Incense upon an altar. And I have no need of a reprisal."
Jon falls silent for a moment. Then he laughs, a tinkling, melodic sound. "Your Archives call to you, Jonah."
And Elias Bouchard can no more resist the siren call of his god anymore than he can neglect his own desperate need to know what has slipped so deftly and rapidly from his grasp.
The doors to the basement open. The patter of footsteps in the distance. There's a dilation in Elias's eyes, like he's not altogether there. The grey bleeds from his eyes to his skin, his breath shallow and rapid. It's out of place, that expression - the eagerness of one that pushes through the crowd, desperate to catch even the barest glimpse. It's the disquieting awe, the passive hunger churning itself into a frenzy.
He sees Martin and Tim first. "Where's Jon?" He asks unevenly.
"Right where I've always been," Jon says. "Watching over my Archives."
It's almost a comical scene - the cold shock that hits Elias is the flash of a lightning strike. It disappears just as quickly, but that's useless because every flicker of emotion is already catalogued and kept. He looms over Jon who does not bother standing back to his feet. Jon sits, Martin crumpled, Tim barely balancing on the heels of his feet, but it is Elias who says calmly as if defusing a bomb in an attempt to regain that simulacrum of control. "Jon, I believe we have already gone through this. Your friends will die if you kill me. Everyone in this Institute will perish. Do you really want their blood on your hands?"
"Death by hubris." Jon tells him. "It's like poetry, isn't it?"
There is a mutual understanding. Elias stands over Jon so very afraid but paralyzed in that fear because it is hardly the only emotion that consumes him. It offers him communion with his god, with this vessel-carved flesh that inhabits every molecule of space where the man had once stood. It irks him, that displacement.
"For all your bluster, you still bled." Jon mused. "So easy to kill." He tilts his head, curious and bird-like. Politer, 'Would you like to see it? To- Know it?"
The tickle of an undone memory, the blade slicing through organs, the bloom of warm blood. Elias barks, "What have you done-"
Jon clucks his tongue. "But those are not your eyes."
The silence rings.
"Can you hear their song?" Jon asks, the expression on his face the most at peace than he had ever been before. "The sound the earth makes, as it screams. The pluck of a discordant string, that impossibility of insanity crushing its own self, the dichotomy of assigning mindlessness to something sentient enough to play favorites. I can hear your fear. Taste it. Revel in its flavor. It ages, like fine wine. Takes on... that twist of its own."
Jon wonders, "What happens if I- hmm... cut the strings? Pull it out off you. Set a little fire of my own."
Elias laughs harshly, "That won't work-"
"Wouldn't it?" Jon asks, genuine, and watches as Elias falls short. He doesn't know. The doubt creeps in, slow and noxious like the curl of poison gas around pumping lungs.
And then in that shared moment of knowing. The flash of a lighter in the underbelly of the beast.
"Statement of Elias Bouchard, formerly known as Jonah Magnus." Jon says quietly. "Statement begins. Statement ends. Goodbye, Jonah."
Deep below, dry bones ignite. Scraps of cloth and marrow go up in flames, in that stagnation of dust and ashes.
-
"There's been a change in management." Jon observes after a while, without preamble. Martin stares blankly, having watched exactly how it was like to witness a man unravel and ram through every stage of decay in a matter of seconds. Somewhere, Tim is audibly sick. "You're all fired."
Martin bursts out. "Oh thank god."
