jmart fic writers i promise it is soooo easy to write an ace character it isnt scary okay theyre not gonna jump out of the screen and kill you okay????
Hiii long time no post here's PART ONE of a comic of a yet unpublished scene from @saintbleeding 's vic fic that made me lightheaded. There will be a part 2 coming. At some point!! Keep in mind this part of the fic hasn't been published yet so is subject to change.
(also for context in case u don't know why Martin gets upset: calling someone by their first name in these times could be seen as either very intimate or very disrespectful. Jon meant it intimately, Martin took it to mean he wants him dead. As is his way.)
... ❝ FEVER DREAMING. ❞ ft. michael distortion x reader
IN WHICH : amidst a burning fever, you catch sight of a familiar figure who's supposedly long-gone.
[ warnings + tags ] sick!reader. fevers, mentions of nausea but nothing graphic. spiral-typical derealisation. set right after michael shelley dies so um. spoilers! gn archival assistant reader. hurt/comfort. wc: 2.7k
[ notes ] ( @rainswept ) man i can't even be sick in peace without the #horrors tormenting me.....
The Archives have always been warm. A part of that was your doing—yours and Michael’s, though he can no longer claim credit for the change—as you pleaded for months when you first arrived for the heating system to be fixed. The temperature was brutal on you all, and eventually it was enough for your request to be granted.
Yet now, even as the heaters are cranked as high as they can go, you continue to shiver. You press the back of your hand to your forehead, wincing at the heat. It’s almost unfair, that with everything you’ve dealt with over the years working for the Magnus Institute, you’re still human enough to be taken out of commission by a simple illness. Nothing supernatural or arcane, nothing unusual at all; only a terrible cough and the creeping signs of a fever working its way into your system.
“You’re not well.” Gertrude notes, making you jump. You didn’t hear the door of her office creak open, but by the time you look up from your paperwork, she’s already at your desk.
“Oh, aren’t you an observant one?” You snap back, the bite in your voice dulled by weariness. There’s a pang of guilt in your chest for lashing out, but you stifle it quickly. Ever since her return, it’s been difficult to treat her as the fragile old woman you once saw.
Her expression is unreadable as usual, but she does breathe out a sigh of vexation. “There’s no need for that.”
“No, there’s no need for you to be bothering me.” You pointedly look down at the scattered files in front of you. “I’m working on the Turner case. I have a lead, and I’m planning to f-follow—” Your words cut off abruptly, a stream of coughs pushing past your lips. After a few moments, you manage to catch your breath enough to choke out: “I’m following up on it.”
“You are not well.” Gertrude repeats, a pinch forming between her brows. If you didn’t know better, you might have thought she looked concerned at the implication. The sight almost makes you laugh, as much as it makes your stomach turn. “You can go home early. Take some rest, and don’t come back to work until you are better.”
You stare back blankly, swallowing down another cough. “What? I’m fine, I’m working.”
“You’re no use to me in this state.” She shakes her head. She leans down to tap her nail on the paperwork you’ve been filling out, frowning at the barely readable handwriting. “Look at this. It’s sloppy. I expect better from my assistants, yet this is clearly all I am receiving today. Go home, and come back rested.”
No amount of protests or feeble assurances that you’re really okay enough to work will change her mind, and eventually you tire of trying. On your way out, the receptionist shoots you a look of concern, but clearly she knows better than to ask.
The journey back to your apartment is a haze, but somehow you make it home. By the time you reach your door, your hands are trembling so much that you can barely manage to slide your key into the lock. The headache you’ve been carefully ignoring has returned, an incessant pounding behind your eyes. It’s a bitter thought, realising that Gertrude was right, but it’s hard to deny now; you really are sick.
Every inch of your body aches, as you push towards your bedroom. On the way, you shed your bag, then your coat, then your shoes, leaving the items thrown haphazardly over whatever piece of furniture you pass. Your scarf ends up thrown over the couch. It is followed by a blue sweater, one you never got the chance to return to its rightful owner. When you enter the bedroom, you don’t have the strength to close the door behind you, but the action is pointless anyway. You’re alone in the apartment, and your only visitor isn’t coming.
Without your outermost layers, the chill is almost unbearable. You fumble with the buttons of your shirt, eventually managing to slip it off, trading it for a much more comfortable hoodie. The shirt is kicked to the corner of your room, next to an overflowing laundry basket. “I’ll fix that,” You mumble, to no one.
The cold doesn’t ease, even after you burrow under your blankets; as soon as you settle, it seems to sink deeper into your skin, turning your veins to ice. A shower, you think numbly. A shower would feel nice. And yet you don’t move, locked in place by the creeping, gnawing pains that grow fiercer with every passing second. By now your throat is raw, each cough making your body shake with the force, but you don’t get up for water.
You don’t do anything at all. All you can bring yourself to do is lay there, a shivering, miserable mess, and hope that the illness puts you out of your suffering swiftly.
—————
Minutes slip by, or perhaps hours. It’s impossible to tell, and eventually you stop trying. You fall in and out of consciousness, teetering on the edge of sleep one moment, before being stirred awake by some ache or pain the next.
And in between it all, you are plagued by dreams—visions of corridors and hallways that twist and turn in impossible ways, stretching endlessly forward as they squeeze you from every side. You can’t make sense of what you’re seeing at all, and the harder you try, the more reality seems to bend and twist outside of your perception. Even as you break through the stupor to take in a breath of consciousness, the hazy quality of your dreams lingers in the air.
As you grow aware of your surroundings, the first thing you notice is your sheets tangled all around your legs, soaked in sweat. You’re still shivering, despite the hot flushes. Even in your addled mind, you can recognise that, though the sensation of your skin feels oddly detached, as though the fever has severed the connection between your mind and body.
It hurts, you think dully. Even that thought is sluggish in your mind.
“What… a mess.”
At first, you don’t properly notice the voice at all. It slides into the space between your wakeful state and the dreams that continue to tug and claw on your subconscious, so easily that it must be one of them too. Another petty hallucination, a product of your rapidly deteriorating mind, this time sculpted into the familiar tone of your former coworker—
The realisation hits hard, at the same time as a violent coughing fit. In between splutters and gasps, you tilt your head up to see where the sound came from—hoping, as much as you know it’s in vain, that somehow it wasn’t just in your head.
At first there is nothing. Only your laundry basket in the corner. Piles of clothes. Your door. A set of drawers, the top stacked with mementos. The window, with your curtains pulled half-closed. And a mirror, reflecting back only yourself. The night—when did it become night—is still, holding its breath.
Until, there is a creak. Until, that yellow door of yours cracks open, and a hand curls around the edge.
“Aren’t you a pitiful sight?” The same voice sighs. The hand is followed by a wrist, then an arm, then the figure of a man as he crawls out from behind the door and into your room. He’s much taller than you were expecting, with long, slender limbs, and a round face. You stare, slack-jawed, as he glides further into the room, a figure so familiar and yet so wrong-looking at the same time.
“Michael…” you croak out. As soon as you speak his name, his image grows indistinct, until you can only make out a blurry mass of blonde ringlets circling its silhouette like a halo. An angel, you think. He looks like an angel in the light. “M’chael… missed you…”
“Michael,” It echoes, as if tasting the name. After a beat of silence, it lets out a quiet laugh, one that sounds familiar at first, but carries a discordant edge you haven’t heard before. It laughs, it laughs and your head pounds. “How quaint. Is that who you see?”
It sounds vaguely mocking, in a way that you can’t quite place. As if it knows something you don’t, and is relishing in the slowly forming confusion on your face. Michael—or whatever it is, lets out a quiet tsk. It says in a coo, “Missed me. You say that without a single trace of alarm, and yet you already know it cannot be. Do you not remember where your ‘Michael’ is?”
“Sannikov Land.” You breathe out, the answer leaving your lips before you can even properly process the words on your tongue. The figure tilts its head, half in surprise, and half in curiousity. “He’s… you’re supposed to be in Sannikov Land.”
“There is no such thing as Sannikov Land.” It replies without skipping a beat.
“No.” You know that for certain. You’d figured it out once Gertrude had returned—alone, a solemn look on her face, and her usual office outfits traded out for one in all black. Mourning. When you finally thought to look for information on the place Michael had supposedly vanished in, your search hadn’t yielded a single result. Sannikov land simply didn’t exist. “No… ‘s not, is there? Never was.”
Gertrude was tight-lipped when you pressed her about it, much to your rising fury. The only thing you got was the assurance that he was gone, and not returning anytime soon. No closure, no comfort, not even an offer of time off while you grieved. His vanishing was treated as just another incident, no different from any of the cases you documented. By a week, she even stopped wearing black.
But you couldn’t move on, even as the world continued to move around you. He’s always been—always was—everything to you.
“Miss you,” You say again, your words slurring together. All the emotions you’ve been keeping bottled up begin to spill over, tears brimming in the corners of your eyes. You’re sick, and you’re in pain, and even if he’s just an intangible figment of your feverish mind, it’s enough to send you spiraling. “I miss you, I’m s’rry, should’ve—should’ve been there.”
Bile rises in the back of your throat, but you don’t stop—can’t stop. The words keep falling out, a stream of apologies and begging for forgiveness from a man who isn’t there, split by the occasional hacking cough. And all throughout it, he doesn’t move. As you speak, Michael stares back, eyes narrowed on your curled up form. Eventually when your voice tapers off to gasping, choking breaths, he finally presses closer, appearing by your bedside in a blink.
It’s only instinct that moves you forward. Your hand reaches for his cheek, and there’s a burst of static as your fingertips meet his skin. It seems to warp under your touch, as if whatever he is, his corporality is in a constant flux. And yet, he doesn’t pull away.
“You’re a sad sight, aren’t you? Asking the forgiveness of what once was, from what now is.” Michael laughs again as your hand withdraws. He sounds distant now, even more than before, and your head is almost too foggy to properly understand a word he’s saying. You mumble out something indistinct, closing your eyes for a second. A second.
When you open them again, one hand cradles the back of your head, as the other holds a glass to your lips. “Drink up,” it sings, in at least three overlapping voices at once, and your mouth obeys before you can even comprehend the instruction. The water is ice-cold, soothing as it slides down your aching throat.
Your brief moment of lucidity is long-gone by now, and in its place is a blur of smearing colours and pinpricks of black spots across your vision. The only thing you can make out is Michael, his hands in your hair, brushing back the sweat-soaked strands from your forehead. Behind him, you can see a flash of yellow, even if it is half-blocked by his body.
“Are we awake now?” He hums.
You cannot bring yourself to answer, but you cling to his words like they’re a lifeline, until you slip back into unconsciousness once more.
—————
You’re losing your mind. There’s no other way to explain what you’re seeing and feeling; your mind is fracturing somehow, pulling apart at the seams until the threads of your sanity are completely unwoven.
A dozen voices collapse into one, speaking words you cannot make out. Something is wrong, something is wrong in a way you can’t even begin to discern. You must be dying, somehow. Your head must be submerged under water, you must be drowning, and yet there are arms circling your waist, pulling you to shore. When you break the surface, it isn’t clarity that greets you, instead another wave of nausea.
Those same arms hold you close, while another set gives you a sharp shove from behind. Reality—if there was any left to be found—shudders and shakes and pulls and pushes and rises and falls, and you cannot make sense of a single thing around you. Whether you’re awake or dreaming is anyone’s guess, but the fractals filling your vision when you open your eyes do not lend evidence towards the former.
“Sweet dreams…” A voice croons, and you grasp for it, but it slips past your fingers. With a howl of laughter, everything melts away into a blanket of nothingness, filled only by an unmistakable static.
—————
It’s well past noon when you wake fully. At some point during the night your fever broke, so by the time you’re fully awake, you’re completely and wholly aware of the terrible state you’re in. Each and every blanket on your bed has been thrown to the floor, and the sheets underneath your back are covered in sweat. You peel yourself away with a groan, clutching at the side of your head.
“What time is it…” You mumble to yourself, blindly patting around the bed for your phone. As you pluck it from underneath your pillow—not that you understand how it ended up there—you switch it on. A few dozen frantic-looking notifications flash across the screen, mostly from Emma, all of which you ignore. You’re way too tired to entertain her antics today.
You’ve never had the patience for Emma Harvey, even less so now that there was no buffer to intercept her meddling and calm down whatever arguments arose between the two of you. Everything was always so much easier when you had—
Michael.
And all of a sudden the back of your throat tastes acidic, and you feel as though you’re going to hurl whatever is left in your stomach. You dimly recall fingers—way too long to be human—carding through your hair, the gentle touch of an almost-lover long gone. That hand had tucked in the covers you’d so carelessly kicked away, had rested its back against your forehead with a mirth-filled sigh. For a dream, even one born from a fever, it was startlingly realistic, even if your delirious mind couldn’t manage to get the details correct.
Delirium, you thought to yourself. Of course that’s what it was. There was no reason for your heart to pound as you recalled the strange events, no matter how vivid and tangible they had felt. Michael was gone, and whatever twisted version had planted itself in your mind was a bitter, unpleasant fantasy.
You breathe out shakily, ignoring the crawl on your skin. It’s easy to explain away the missing details and strange events that don’t add up, that’s all that your job entails anyway. Coming up with every reason to believe something isn’t true. And the experience itself couldn’t even be considered supernatural, it was a dream. You’ve had worse, and none of them had killed you before. There was no reason to be so on edge.
Maybe the grief was getting to you after all.
“Ugh…” A shake of your head, and you crawl out of bed towards your door. “I need a shower…”
You never even notice that on the side of your table is a glass of water you never poured, innocently placed beside a packet of painkillers you never bought.
