Chapter Text
With one eye on the grey sky Tim was acutely aware of his loose hands, empty of the umbrella Martin offered him on his way out for lunch. Fingers opened and closed in his pocket, scars stretching as he returned from the cafe he frequented with Sasha. Well, he used to. Her new boyfriend – “Tom” - really? One letter made the difference? – had outranked their traditional bitch and chips session to start the week. For the third time.
He supposed he could forgive today's absence. Elias’ manic scheduling had brought half the Institute in on a Sunday. Reinstallation of the buildings CO2 system months after the Prentiss attack reeked of business malpractice, scheduling the process on a Friday and forcing the staff into a warped Friday-Saturday weekend was the overripe cherry on top.
Reaching for his phone as it vibrated to life, Tim kept turning over Sasha’s ever polite dismissal of his lunch break invitation. The injuries forcing him to take a month off work couldn’t have been more ill timed; he could have used those weeks to talk her out of starting a relationship right after a traumatic life event. Hell, he could have done it from home if she bothered to text him back.
Tim still hadn’t met this ‘Tom’, despite the appearance of an actual printed photograph balanced on Sasha’s reorganized desk. One month and she was investing in a framed reminder? Why hadn't she changed her lock screen like a normal person? But no, instead the collection of office origami attempts were replaced, along with the rainbow post it notes and the cup entirely filled with black sharpies. Tim didn’t blame her for binning his shitty butterfly, but Martin was uncharacteristically proud of the tiny, lopsided cow he folded from a disproved statement. Or was it a police report? Or…? The memory was flimsy, crumpling under inspection like the well creased scraps Sasha so abruptly discarded.
Shaking off latent, self-righteous indignation over a paper bovine, Tim grinned at his phone caller ID. The screen was populated with a hyper focused Martin surreptitiously fixing the tag on Jon’s cardigan during a rare breakroom appearance of their boss (Tim had taken the photo a week and a half ago. He hadn’t informed either of them. Yet.) Rain drops were collecting on the screen as Tim thumbed to answer. A particular oddness percolated at the base of his skull; Martin hated calling. Tim could count on one hand the number of calls he had from his friend. He shook his head, scattering a few water droplets. Probably nothing.
“Hey freckles. To what do I owe the pleasure of –”
Martin’s voice crashed over the phones speaker, cutting Tim off in a whirlwind of blurry articulation. “Tim, thank god, I can’t find Jon and he isn’t answering and Jon always always picks up if I call him more than five times, I don’t know if he’s dead or–”
Tim pulled up short, hand moving instinctively to cover his ear and block out the London traffic. “Whoa, whoa Martin slow down.”
Martin did not.
“There is blood all over the office and Sasha said Jon was here a minute ago but he clearly isn’t now, and there was some woman giving a statement and nobody has seen her either, what if she kidnapped him or–”
“Okay, nobody is getting kidnapped,” Tim said, quickly resuming his route with a sharp purpose to his steps, sound of his shoes on the pavement speeding up to match his climbing heart rate. He forced his voice into something manageable. “That would be a bit much, even for the Institute.” Tim hoped the assurance sounded better than it tasted.
“Yeah, but–”
“Martin.” Information. Tim desperately shoved back at the rising tide of ‘she’s back she’s back should have known’. He needed information he could act on, sifting through every worried stare and cut off comment Jon made since his limping return to the office. Should have paid more attention, should have known. “I want to help. I will help. But I have no idea what’s going on.”
“Well I don’t either!” Martin choked out. Exactly how awful the sufficiently awful situation was sunk another claw in as Tim realized Martin was crying.
“Look, I’m almost back,” Tim said, nearly stepping blindly into the street. “Just – start from the beginning?” He bit down on a curse as the light changed. Waiting a beat, Tim was met with nothing but shaky breathing from the other end of the line. “Martin, really need you to talk to me buddy. What are we up against? Should we be calling the police?”
“Maybe?” Martin said, voice small in a way Tim had heard once before, through a door. Nearly missed over the whir of the tape recorder and the lines of pain as he reached for his bag. Martin’s apology to Tim came later, more composed and following strings of texts and reassurances that Tim didn’t blame him. Nothing like the raw scrape of guilt he caught from the office, prompting Tim to loitered around, picking at fresh bandages until Jon acknowledged the heartfelt sorry. “There – there’s a lot of blood.” Martin finished, nearing a whisper.
“Okay,” Tim said, heels bouncing as he turned on the spot. How long was this damn light? “Let’s start there – where is it?”
“I found,” Martin stopped so short Tim had to spare a glance to check if the call dropped. If not that...
“Breathe,” Tim said lightly.
There was a rush of unsteady static. “Yeah – right. I found, I found blood in Jon’s office. And the hall. And the break room.”
“Right.” Tim said. He wasn’t sure if there was anything else he could say to that. He shifted restlessly from foot to foot, eyeing the inordinate, impassable barrage of vehicles blocking his path. Traffic had lulls, right? He could find a gap to bolt across. Clinging to that, Tim watched and watched and was not at all imagining an office splattered, hallway trailing, or breakroom puddled with the bright angry smears on his clothes, on his arms, on his chest when he jerked awake in quarantine.
“And Jon was, he’s just gone.”
Tim swallowed, hard. Felt the stretch of skin pocketed across his free hand, clenching and unclenching, beginning to chill from the steadily increasing rain dotting his shoulders. The shadow of pain forced him back to the moment. He banished a bloody Archive menagerie to one of so many boxes hastily labeled ‘repressed’ and really wished he didn’t work in a building where the next question was relevant. “Did you check the door to the tunnels?”
“Of course I checked the trapdoor!” Martin snapped. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Not what I said.” Tim chanced half a step forward and was nearly side swiped by a bus. Fine. He would wait.
“No – I’m sorry.” Tim winced at the hearty sniff as Martin tried to clear his blocked nose. “I just – nobody has seen him. The lock isn’t broken or anything and Elias isn’t here. Rosie said she can't unlock his office so I can’t exactly search his desk.” Martin’s voice was pitching up to dangerous octaves again. Tim was preparing to run for election with the sole purpose of improving crosswalk timing. He tried to distract himself with a muted pride for Martin's willingness to search Elias’ office as Martin carried on. “Unless the walls are moving I’m supposed to believe something hurt Jon and he snuck out without telling anybody.”
Martin's hypothetical stuck through Tim’s fluttering concern, viciously pinning the frantic beating of his heart like some struggling winged thing might be stuck for display. All the closed doors, the suspicious glances – an unexpected burst of frustration made an unbecoming pass at Tim’s mounting concern. “Would you put it past him?”
Martin went deadly quiet. Well fuck. “Mart–”
“Look, even if he did,” Martin said, obliterating Tim’s ill formed half apology, “he needs our help.”
“No, you’re right.” Tim conceded firmly. Took less than a half seconds retrospect to conclude this was not the time for airing grievances. Copious amounts of blood at play or not, under no circumstances would Tim take out the conversation he needed to have with Jon on Martin. Across the intersection, the light finally, finally changed to yellow. Tim resolved silently to apologize better after the crisis was... averted. Dealt with. Something. “I’m almost to you, okay? We can deal with this together.”
“Okay,” Martin said, sounding miserable.
“Great. Good,” Tim said, taking the zebra stripes two at a time. He hit the pavement running. Rounding the corner, he swerved to avoid a stumbling pedestrian. “I’m hanging up now, go ask Sasha to – oh shit, sorry – Jon?!”
Tim had thrown a hand out to keep from accidentally shoving the unbalanced figure to the ground, his fingers brushing their sleeve. The weird material of Jon’s favorite jacket pushed recognition past Tim’s lips before other details – height: short, hair: dark curly mess – began to register. Jon had the same damn jacket for years. It was heavy and checkered and hideous and indisputably Jon. Peripherally Tim could hear Martin calling from the phones tinny speakers, concerns melding with street sounds as Tim tried to reconcile the past minutes ballooning fears with the decidedly un-missing Jon in front of him.
Jon looked awful, and Tim was right there next to him when a swarm of aggressively parasitic worms made a meal of the both of them. The blood Martin had been on about wasn’t particularly eye catching on Jon’s green sweater but the dark stain was undeniably beading bright red over Jon’s shaking fingers. It wasn't raining hard enough for the sheen across his forehead to be anything but sweat, his glasses tilted precariously and heavily smudged. Without his cane he was listing hard to the right, each labored breath bringing him closer to folding over entirely. For all his heavy breathing, his cheeks were devoid of color as Jon leaned into Tim’s hasty shoulder grab.
“You’re bleeding.” Tim said dumbly. Not his finest appraisal of a situation. The appearance of Jon out of the halls of the Institute met with a disbelieving ricochet of not dead not dead thank fuck not dead and spun so fast Tim was nearing dizzy.
“Yes,” Jon said faintly, taking a stumble step into the wall for support. “It would appear so.”
Jon’s voice broke the paralysis his unexpected arrival had over Tim. Okay, mystery one solved. Now to deal with… this. Distantly, Martin yelling from the phone shuffled into place amid a rapidly developing list of priorities. Martin cut off the moment Tim replied.
“Hey – I found him.” Tim ducked his head, but getting a good look at the injury was nigh impossible one handed. Jon curled over another inch, pulling away from Tim’s grip towards the brick front of the apartment complex where they had nearly collided. “He's..." Tim faltered, trying to sum up Jon's state in the least number of syllables. "Alive. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
However quickly he rationalized it, Tim knew hanging up on a confused and desperate Martin was already twisting into one more horrible experience to add to his collection. Tim grimly figured he could make it up to him by keeping Jon from bleeding out on the pavement, rapidly darkening under the rainfall. In the four seconds it took Tim to finish his call, Jon had managed to stagger a few paces further. He left a thin, incriminating streak across a selection of brick behind him. Wincing, Tim maneuvered quickly to cut Jon off.
“Where you headed boss man?”
Jon’s eyebrows pinched, the same surprised scrunch when Tim sent him memes. A rare moment of pure Jon confusion Tim usually had to work a lot harder for, one that recently took to flattening into ill disguised glares. But there was no follow up frown, and no confidence in Jon’s halting reply. “The… clinic?”
“The clinic is that way.” Tim said, nodding over Jon’s shoulder to the last block. Ah. Another masterful observation. The absolute abruptness of this entire encounter had robbed him of intelligent recourse – he needed to do – something.
Jon reached a similar conclusion, turning with with agonizing slowness. Tim hovered awkwardly, watching Jon’s attempt to favor both his injured side and bad leg. “Well. Thank you.” Leaning heavily on the wall Jon started back, over his own faint snail trail of blood.
Of all things it was those three words, riding on a gasp, that snapped Tim back to action. It said something about their relationship that a ‘thank you’ from his boss was more out of place than a trail of blood, but exactly what Tim didn’t have time to speculate. “Fuck sake Jon – let me help.”