Jon hasn't actually emerged from a month with the Circus utterly unscathed, but the world is ending. There isn't time to dwell on it.
Written for the @febuwhump bonus challenge, Febuclown! (content warnings: kidnapping, flensing, nonconsensual touching, flashbacks, bullying)
ao3 link in source!
Jon goes through Helen’s door, and when he comes out the other side, he’s in his office. It’s so unexpected, he can do nothing for a moment but stand there. He wants to ask her, why not torment him, at least a little? Why, why, why.
He imagines her saying, Isn’t that what friends are for? and he almost wants to laugh. He’s back. He lived. And that’s—It’s—It’s—
It’s dark. The lights are all turned off, and the office is silent. It’s the middle of the night. He goes to his desk. It isn’t the way he’d left it. He’s pretty sure it isn’t, anyway. It had been cluttered before, but not like this.
Jon sits down in his chair, once again feeling the urge to laugh. Here he is. Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, alive and wholly un-flensed.
… No, thinking about flensing is a bad idea. Don’t—don’t do that. Don’t.
He wonders how long he’s been gone. He goes to turn on his computer, to check the date, but before the screen even lights up, he already knows it’s been a month.
A month.
A month of—
Screams. It’s all he can hear, is screaming. He’d spent the first few days determined to escape, determined to get out of here and take as many of the others with him as he could. And then he’d started wishing they would stop, that he didn’t have to hear them, the constant reminder that he’d failed them as well as himself. As well as the world, probably.
Now he dreads the moment they stop. When it stops is when Nikola will come back. She’ll tsk over the tears on his cheeks, and tilt his head back and choke him with water until she’s satisfied he’s swallowed enough to re-hydrate himself. And then she’ll untie him, and he’ll stretch his legs while she watches, and at best what happens next will be nothing more than a reapplication of lotion. At worst—
Well, at worst, she’ll skin him. So really the rest of it isn’t so bad, is it? He tells himself that. He tells himself that he just needs to hang on, that someone will come for him. Elias, or, or—someone.
(God, he wishes Martin were here.)
(Well, no, not here, but—he wishes he were with Martin. He wishes they were both safe.)
He knows that no one is coming. He knows. He doesn’t know how many days it’s been, but he’s been here a long time. Long enough that anyone who wanted to save him would have by now. Long enough that they’ve probably given him up for dead anyway.
He’s going to die here.
He keeps thinking about Daisy. About that night in the woods, her knife at his throat. He’d been so afraid then, but… it would have been quick, wouldn’t it? Mike’s death had been quick. And it’s not that Jon is upset that he didn’t die that night, but Nikola is going to skin him and he just—
Jon grips the arms of his chair, and forces himself to take a breath. Another. He reminds himself that he didn’t die, either time. He’s alive. He’s safe. At least for now, he’s safe.
A month.
Jon doesn’t move for a long time. He has a vague fantasy of just… staying here. Or crawling underneath his desk, where it is small and dark and hidden. Pushing at the edges of his thoughts where they turn painful, digging his fingers into the thin veneer of glass between this moment and the past month and just… allowing himself to break.
He wants it. He wants the others to find him a sobbing, gibbering mess, tearing at his hair, curled up small against how much he hurts. He wants them to carefully pull his hands away, to pitch their voices with gentle reassurance, telling him, It’s alright, Jon, you’re safe now. Help him to his feet and lead him to the cot in document storage, or maybe to the ratty plush couch in the break room. Get him a glass of water and something to eat, and when it became clear he couldn’t talk about it, wait with patient concern to find out where he’d been.
It’s only a fantasy. They wouldn’t do any of that.
Jon can’t save the world if he’s shattered.
(A month.)
So he carefully avoids the glass wall in his mind and pulls himself to his feet. His joints faintly ache, but it could be worse. They’d given him plenty of opportunities to move around, to avoid sores forming, marring his—
Jon doesn’t think about it. He goes out into the Archive proper and fumbles around in the dark until he comes to a light switch. The light is nice. It had been so dark before.
He goes to the break room, and the sight of the little kitchenette, the collection of chipped mugs on the drying rack, nearly brings him to tears. He loves this kitchenette, he thinks, a bit manically.
He wants to laugh again. Is that good? He doesn’t know.
He pours himself a glass of water. After a moment of consideration, he goes digging in the cabinets, looking for—there! Little pouches of powdered drink mixes. They’re years old, relics of a better time. Jon takes one, pours it into his glass, watches the clear water turn red.
He takes a sip, and it’s sweet, and that’s wonderful.
Sugar is bad for your skin, he thinks, and this time he actually does laugh.
He drains his glass and washes it out in the sink, setting it down on the drying rack next to the mugs. They’re mostly Martin’s mugs. He misses Martin, but that makes sense, doesn’t it? He hasn’t seen Martin in a—
He’s covered in lotion.
The thought suddenly occurs to him, and then that’s all he can think of. It would be time for his reapplication, if he were still—If—If—But he isn’t, though. He’s in the Archive, in his Archive, and he needs to get this lotion off before he tears his own skin off.
Ha! Save Nikola the trouble of doing it herself.
Not that it would have been much trouble for her. She’d shown him, a few times, how sharp her fingers could be. What it looked like afterward. She was very proud of her work, the cleanness of her cuts, her precision. She talked about it a lot. It was the only thing she talked about, really.
There wasn’t anyone else to talk to, for an entire month.
Jon takes a shower. He doesn’t use soap. Seems like a bad idea. He just rubs at his skin with a washrag until he stops feeling so… slimy.
He throws out his clothes from earlier. He can’t—He just—He can’t. He can’t. He has other clothes here in the Archives. Better clothes. He doesn’t know where they ended up since he was last here, but they must be… somewhere.
He’s digging through document storage when he finds a box of Martin’s things. Nothing important. Clothes. Toiletries. Things that could be easily missed, hastily moving out of your workplace after it was revealed to be stunningly vulnerable to worms.
Jon should put the box back where he found it. He shouldn’t set it on the cot and begin digging through it, heart tightening with fondness at every discovery. He shouldn’t unfold one of Martin’s sweaters. He shouldn’t run his hands over the fabric, entranced by the softness. He shouldn’t put it on. He really, really shouldn’t put it on.
It smells like Martin.
Jon should take it off, but he doesn’t. He lays down on the cot, pulling the thin blanket over himself, and he lets himself imagine that Martin is there with him.
***
He wakes up early. 4:47, according to the digital clock in the break room. The nightmares are too bad for him to go back to sleep, so instead he gets started with his day. He takes another shower, because he can, and this time he digs a bar of Martin’s soap from the box. He hopes the fact that it smells like Martin will help him deal with the feeling of having something lathered into his skin.
It doesn’t, but he tries to ignore it. He pushes himself until he can’t breathe through the panic, and then he finds himself sitting on the shower floor, trembling as the water splashes over him. He needs to pull himself together, he needs to pull himself together, he needs to pull himself together.
He pulls himself together. He gets dressed. He goes back to the break room and starts a pot of coffee. The clock now says 6:30. He’s fine. He is.
“Nice of you to show your face around here,” Tim says behind him, nothing but hostility in his voice. “Enjoy your vacation?”
Jon tenses, but he’d known he would have to talk to the others eventually, didn’t he? Not this early, though. “I was kidnapped,” he says softly.
“You’ve already used that excuse.”
Jon’s hands are shaking. He can’t do this. He has to. No way out but through. He turns to face Tim, leaning on the counter behind him to steady himself. He can’t meet Tim’s eyes. Instead, he stares at his shoulder. “I guess my luck is just that bad,” he says, going for levity, hoping that will make Tim leave him alone.
“You look great,” Tim says, sarcasm heavy in his words. “So I guess you’ve got some luck after all.”
Jon wants to laugh. Jon wants to say, The secret to healthy skin is good nutrition, plenty of hydration, and a thoughtfully put-together skin care routine. But then he’s thinking about flensing again—he’s always going to be thinking about flensing, isn’t he?—and he has to grip the counter tightly to keep himself upright. He takes deep breaths as the wave of nausea passes over him, and when he feels like he can open his mouth without throwing up, he says, “I’m not lying.”
“Sure,” Tim says. He’s still blocking the doorway. He’s still here, why is he still here, what else could he want?
“Did you need something?”
“An apology might be nice,” Tim says. “It’s not the best managerial practice, you know, abandoning your ‘assistants’ for a month after trapping us all in hell.”
Jon feels suddenly very angry. Tim should be the one apologizing to him. It had been a month, a whole month, and none of them had so much as looked for him.
But they didn’t know. They didn’t know, they couldn’t have—they couldn’t have known. Even Tim, who is insisting on, on, on doing this to him is just—is—he’s—he’s angry. He’s angry because they’re all trapped here, and that is Jon’s fault. And he’s angry because their friendship has disintegrated, and that’s Jon’s fault too.
Maybe it’s all Jon’s fault, every bit of it. Maybe he should apologize for being kidnapped. Maybe that’s the right thing to do. Maybe it’ll help.
He knows it isn’t true. He deserves to be angry, actually. He’s been through hell, and he’s holding himself together for the sake of the world, and Tim is trying to break him anyway.
But if Jon shouts at Tim, Tim will shout back. And Tim knows Jon, knows all the words that will hurt the most. Tim could break down the glass barrier so easily, and it—that—Jon needs the barrier.
So Jon says, quietly, “I’m sorry.”
“What?”
Jon wipes at his eyes, at his cheek that is suddenly wet with tears. He can’t cry. He can’t let himself cry. “I’m sorry,” he says again, and his voice isn’t any louder, and this time his voice cracks around the words.
Tim rolls his eyes. Then, blessedly, he leaves.
Jon turns around and leans over the counter, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. His palms are soft, the softest they’ve ever been, and that thought, of course, leads to thoughts of flensing. He lets out a sob, and then he bites down hard on one of his hands, until a high whine of pain comes from the back of his throat and his mind feels a little clearer.
He forces himself to take deep breaths, putting the Circus out of his mind. Basira and Melanie will be here soon, and perhaps Daisy. (Please, please not Daisy.) But that’s hours away. He doesn’t need to catastrophize about it right now.
***
It would be easier if he didn’t have to read statements about the Circus all day. Every time he hears the Circus mentioned, it feels like he’s banging on the glass wall, just begging it to break and leave him at the mercy of whatever lurks behind it.
He wishes he didn’t have to think about it.
He wishes the others would help. Why does the entire world have to rest on him, why is it his job to get burned and sent into freefall and hunted and kidnapped and then relive it all in the fucking statements while the rest of them just—just—just—
… That isn’t fair. They are helping. The world is ending, of course they’re—And it’s not like Jon really wants any of them to read statements anyway, and—and—and it’s not like Jon has given them any reason to think anything is particularly wrong with him.
(He’d been kidnapped for a month, he shouldn’t need to—)
But he hasn’t told them the worst of it. He hasn’t told them about the screams or the lotion or the certainty that he was going to die. He hasn’t told them about the flensing. He’s told them as much as he’s been able to force himself to say, and every time he interacts with Basira or Melanie or Daisy, it’s clear they’re thinking, “Well, it couldn’t have been that bad.” Jon is on his feet, after all, walking around like nothing happened. He doesn’t even have a new scar this time.
He sometimes wishes that the Circus had actually hurt him, beyond his ability to pretend.
He imagines what it would have been like, had they found him collapsed on the floor of his office, too exhausted to move, starving and dehydrated and feverish, unable to walk because he’d spent the past month tied to a chair. He imagines them helping him. He imagines them watching his recovery, treating him with, with patience. He imagines them saying, Thanks for working so hard figuring out how to stop the Unknowing. It must be hard.
It’s only a fantasy. He knows they wouldn’t—
He knows he’s lucky it isn’t worse.
***
And then there’s Martin.
Martin brings tea every single day and asks in a gentle voice, “Are you okay?”
And Jon says, “Well the world is ending, so I’ve been better.”
And Martin says, “Jon…”
Because Martin isn’t like the others. Martin listens. Martin pays attention. Martin can tell that Jon isn’t okay, and he wants to help.
“Thank you for the tea,” Jon says, and means it. The tea helps, more than anything else. Knowing that Martin made it for him, that Martin cares, that Jon is back in a world of stoves and kettles and care, is… everything.
“If you ever want to talk,” Martin says, and he doesn’t mean it as a platitude. He means: I know it was bad, and I don’t want you to bear it on your own.
Jon doesn’t want to bear it on his own, either. It’s too heavy. He thinks, constantly, about how nice it would feel to just put it down. To let the glass wall break, to let himself collapse. Jon’s been to therapy before. He knows how this works. He knows that it won’t get better unless he acknowledges everything that happened and lets it tear him apart.
But the world is ending, and Jon doesn’t have time to pick up the pieces.
