Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Somewhere, a kettle whistles.

Jon wakes with a paper clip all but stamped into the side of his cheek, the deep imprint of office supplies, metal marking him during a fitful night’s sleep. A blanket has been draped across his shoulders, wool bunched in the crook of his elbow. He’s breathing hard, his ribcage the accordion, his lungs its punctured, wheezing bellows. His heart rattles, and Jon knows that twenty-nine should be much too young for cardiac arrest, but suddenly he’s not so sure. Something sharp twinges in his abdomen, and on instinct Jon reaches for a wound, hands patting. His wrists are shaking, fingers trembling, but he’s whole.

No, perhaps that’s not true. Where’s the rest of him? There’s something lost—stolen? He notices for the first time how dim the room is. Not a shadow to be seen, but Jon gets the feeling that his periphery has shrunk. He gets the feeling that he’s supposed to be able to see through these walls, or to know through them at least.

The walls. He recognises the walls.

It’s almost like downloading a file on his grandmother’s clunky, useless computer back in Bournemouth. Back twenty years ago.

But it’s not a file. It’s years of pain, and pain beyond that Jon hadn’t measured in days, but in footsteps. In statements.

He sees those last few moments play out, credits rolling up on the big screen. And there his hands go, feeling for where Martin cut the tether. Feeling for blood, anything.

Jon is whole—no, he is hollowed out.

Martin. Martin’s breath in his ear, I love you too , clutching the shards of Jon’s shattered promises. Where is Martin? Jon can’t remember enough, he can’t fucking see. Martin was there, holding him when the tape ran out. Martin is supposed to be here, wherever here is. Had Jon left him behind, crushed beneath the collapsing weight of the Panopticon? No, no. Jon had been holding him too.

Jon tries to know, but stumbles, blinded. Static howls in his head and Jon’s thoughts coalesce into one frantic tangle. Statements blur his mind. The angles cut me when I try to think. Jon thinks (because he no longer knows) he understands what Sergey Ushanka had meant.

Jon tries to stand, his legs stinging, pins and needles, and nearly topples over, just barely catching himself on the desk.

His desk. His office. His archive. Jon grips the wood, remembering these walls, hating these walls, hating what they had hidden.

“Martin,” he croaks. 

On the desk is a typed up, printed statement. The staple sits neatly at a forty-five degree angle, Sasha’s work, no doubt.

Jon’s fingers roam over his torso once more, still not believing he’s alive, not when Martin isn’t here with him. There had been something built-in about Martin for a while, ever since Jon had promised he knew the way home, out of the fog, and perhaps long before then. Maybe that’s the part that Jon’s missing.

On the desk is a tape recorder. Jon’s hands don’t itch like they used to, but his chest—his chest burns. Jon takes the recorder, and on shaky legs, stomps it into the ground.

“Fuck. You.”

Jon likes how it looks, cracked and battered like that. He kicks it underneath his desk, out of sight. He wonders if Georgie had had the right idea after all. It wasn’t unusual, Georgie being right and Jon hating being wrong.

His hands are all wrong. No scars, no burns. Only a paper cut on the inside of his middle finger.

There’s a knock at the door and Jon stills because despite the many things that Jon is, he is no stranger to knocking.

“Wasn’t sure if you were sleeping in here,” a voice confides.

In pokes a head of sandy hair, a shoulder draped in knitwear, steam and a sliver of ceramic.

“Martin,” Jon says, the breath knocked out of him. “You’re alive.”

“Am I…not supposed to be?” Martin is watching him, puzzled, his eyebrows drifting upward.

“I’m so, so sorry. I couldn’t doom them, I—” Jon’s voice begins to break. “You weren’t supposed to be there. I shouldn’t have forced you to be strong enough for the both of us, but it was always going to end like this. You were right about me being a bastard. It was too late.”

“Jon—”

“Look, we’re safe, we’re together, like we promised. It’s over, really over,” Jon interrupts, desperate. He almost reaches out for Martin’s hand, but stops himself at the strange, flighty expression on Martin’s face.

Still balancing the tray with the tea against his hip, Martin offers him a polite, embarrassed smile. 

“Can you rewind a bit? I’m a little—a little lost.”

Jon, who has not relied on observation, in the conventional sense, for so long now, stutters and comes to a stand-still as the horrific realisation dawns.

This is not the Martin who had seen Jon, who had honeymooned with Jon in the apocalypse, who had kissed him as the tape unspooled. This is the Martin Blackwood of 2016: the restless poet, the lacking employee, perpetually sleep-rumpled, all his things packed away in boxes in the back of document storage.

He’s so young, Jon can’t help but think. And then, look how he braces for my words.

Jon tries for a reassuring smile. “Never mind, it’s—erm. It’s nothing to worry about. Just something I read.”

Martin, still unsettled, nods. “Oh, uh, alright.”

A moment of awkward silence passes between them. Jon can hardly recall the last time a silence had torn at him like this, not after that night in Daisy’s safehouse, when Jon had sat next to Martin on the sofa and threaded their fingers together, scared, so scared that Martin would want to let go.

This Martin’s eyes fix to the blanket, abandoned on Jon’s chair.

Martin coughs. “Well, I probably should…”

“Yeah,” Jon says.

The mug clinks as Martin sets the tray on the desk. He backs out of the office, mumbling a quick good morning. Before Jon can remember to stop openly staring, Martin has disappeared out into the hallway.

Jon wanders over to the desk, curious about the date that his laptop screen will show, but mostly hoping that a few sips of Martin’s tea will help put him back together again, as it always has done. Jon drags his finger across the trackpad and the screen awakens at his touch. There in the upper righthand corner. 29th July.

On the desk is a statement—a statement Jon knows to belong to Andre Ramao.

Jon knows this day. This day dug holes beneath his skin, gouged him, one of many marks much deeper than the outline of a paper clip against his cheek. Not yet, it hasn’t . A glimmer of hope: not yet.

But why here? Why now? There are few days that Jon would voluntarily stumble through a second time, and 29th July is not one of them. So, who chose this?

Is it some odd ripple of spacetime? One last trick spun by the Mother of Puppets? The hallucinatory flickering of synapses sputtering out? Or, most terrifying of all, a second chance, another opportunity for Jon to doom them all again?

Jon folds himself into his office chair and sifts for a memory, anything that might patch the gap between his last words and the ones spoken after. He sits there for what feels like hours, not daring to touch the statement on the desk.

And perhaps it really has been hours because when the door to his office swings open, Jon has the sinking feeling that the minutes have just slipped through the cracks between his fingers. He’s not quite sure how to re-exist in 2016, not quite sure he even can.

“Jon? Still there?”

“Sorry, what was that?” Jon stammers, slamming back into time with a vicious thud.

Tim is leaning against the door jamb, head cocked in that obnoxious, teasing way of his. Jon’s chest aches at the sight of him.

“I’m grabbing lunch at the Korean place on the corner,” Tim repeats. “Want anything?”

Jon looks at him—the amused quirk of his mouth, the relaxed set of his shoulders, the unfurrowed space between his eyebrows. Tim had hated Jon, by the end.

Jon supposes that, by the end, he had deserved it a little more each day.

“No, no thank you,” Jon says, business-like.

Tim shrugs. “Whatever you say, boss.” Jon watches as he steps out from the doorway.

“Tim,” Jon calls.

Tim spins back around. “Changed your mind about Korean?”

Jon nearly warns him, almost says, What would you say to taking the rest of the day off? You’ve earned it. In fact, you ought to quit now, while there’s still a chance that you can.

Instead, he says, “Sasha told me you managed to find a copy of Mr. Ramao’s marriage licence?”

“It’s not there? I left it on your desk, paper-clipped to the notes on Salesa.”

Right, the paper clip.

Jon flips through the stack of documents, not quite registering their words. “Never mind, I must have missed it on my first look-through,” he corrects. “Thank you, Tim.”

“No problem.” Tim grins. “All in a day’s work for your favourite archival assistant, right?”

“Sure.”

Tim spreads his hands, a self-congratulatory gesture. “Oh, and Rosie wanted to talk to you about the CO2 canisters we ordered, something about justifying our expenditures.”

Jon feels almost nauseous enough to laugh. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Jon remembers this jaunty mood, remembers watching Tim vanish into the hallway with long strides. He watches it replay now, frozen.

Jon blinks and suddenly the time on his laptop has jumped ahead by fourteen minutes. His neck twitches, stiff, and he rubs at the sore muscles. How can he fix this? How can he turn his shadowy limbs solid? How can he cut through this inertia that leaves him nothing more than an echo, a bystander in his own memories?

His desk drawer is open, though he doesn’t recall opening it. Jon is holding the lighter, unable to remember reaching for it. Almost as if in a trance, he pushes its lid back, watching the flame dance. Any closer and he might as well singe the tip of his nose.

Can I have a cigarette? The words tumble out of some far recess of Jon’s mind, tasting of smoke, and Jon drops the lighter, letting it clatter to his desk.

Suddenly, a dark, spindly blur draws Jon’s attention. There, the spider crawls along a shelf, skirting around the protruding edges of files. It’s the same one, Jon knows. The same eight beady eyes guiding him, moulding him. Images of Martin, bound in webs, flash through Jon’s head, and Jon shoots out of his chair, crosses the room in the space of a second, and crashes his hand into the shelf, aiming blindly.

The shelf shudders pathetically and collapses, scattering documents in a dejected pile at Jon’s feet. Someone should probably pick that up, Jon thinks, detached. The spider has disappeared, unscathed if Jon is to judge by the lack of haemolymph spattered on his palms.

“Alright?”

Jon glances over his shoulder to find Sasha, one hand still on the doorknob.

“A spider,” Jon hears himself say.

“Only a spider?” Sasha gives him a pitying look. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

Try two , Jon amends.

“The, er—the shelf collapsed when I tried to kill it.”

Sasha steps forward to inspect the misshapen remnants of what still stands of the shelf, eyes wide with that mix of determination and curiosity that means not even Tim’s distractions are going to get between her and whatever secure database’s login screen she has pulled up on her computer for the next few hours.

Jon remembers Sasha, the real Sasha, in bits and pieces. Her voice on the tapes in the cabin, the vague glimpses of her face that he’d managed to know, her steady hands on a corkscrew, spearing the writhing thing buried in Jon’s leg. But the other, the thing that was not Sasha, had enmeshed itself in these memories, replacing her smiles, her strong opinions on pronunciation, her brutally honest advice, her immaculately stapled reports.

And that was the worst thing of all. Not to end, but to end and be forgotten.

“I didn’t forget,” Jon tells her.

Sasha tears her eyes away from the shelf. “Forget what?” 

Jon falters under her scrutiny. “Er, Martin’s birthday.”

“I should hope not,” Sasha says, giving him an odd look. “It’s not until October.”

“Right, October.” 

“Why? Are you planning something special?” Sasha’s grin is slow-spreading and knowing. “I don’t think he’s the biggest fan of surprise parties. You saw how he reacted last year.”

“I’m not—I was just thinking it might be wise to be aware. In—in terms of workplace morale,” Jon stammers.

Sasha nods thoughtfully, returning to her inspection. “Well, if it’s Martin’s morale you’re worried about, you’d probably be better off not leaving a trail of arachnid corpses behind.”

Jon pauses. What were his lines for this part again? Something, something, ecosystem?

“They’re a predatory keystone species.”

“Let me guess, another one of his lectures?” Sasha gives Jon a sympathetic smile.

It had been a nature documentary, actually, the only thing on telly that night. Martin had called it exposure therapy. 

Sasha runs her hands over the cracked plasterboard, humming in approval. “You must have hit it pretty hard to dent the wall like that.”

She prods the fracture with her fingertips experimentally. “I thought this was an exterior wall.”

Jon is stuck, feet rooted to the floor. Cold regret floods through him at the thought of what came—what comes next.

“Do you hear that?” Sasha asks. “Sounds like—what is that?”

Jon can hear them too now. A mass of squirming bodies, waiting, waking as Sasha peels at the hole in the hall.

“Sasha,” Jon says carefully. Again: “Sasha.”

Squirming, silver things begin to seep from the wall and Sasha reels back, nearly tripping over a stack of files.

“Run,” Jon begs. The word breaks on his lips.

With worms pounding against the door to the document storage room, Jon makes a list. Lists are for when things get bad. When making it through without bullet points just isn’t an option. And, hey, turns out things are very bad at the moment.

 

Item One: Sasha is not going to die today.

Item Two: Tim is not going to learn what it feels like to be burrowed into this time.

Item Three: No one is stumbling across dead bodies under any circumstances.

“Jon?”

Jon pinches the bridge of his nose. He’s not sure if it’s the time travel or the mortal terror but Christ, his skull is pounding.

“Jon?” Martin repeats.

“Let me think,” Jon snaps because for an instant he is Jonathan Sims at twenty-nine, willing to lash out at anyone if it means he can tamp down the fear and keep pretending.

Martin’s mouth slides shut.

Jon softens. “Sorry, I’m—I just need to—” He sighs, frustrated. “I’m sorry.”

God damn, his head is throbbing. “What were you saying?”

Martin draws in a sharp, cautious breath. “Do you think we’ll be alright in here? I told Sasha the room’s sealed. Soundproof.”

“They could get in through the air con,” Sasha points out.

“No, they won’t,” Jon says, and this time it isn’t just an optimistic assumption. “We’ll be safe if we stay in here. This time, no one leaves, okay?”

Martin gives him a puzzled look, lips tucked into a thin frown. “This time?”

“I can’t see Prentiss anymore,” Sasha interrupts, face pressed against the small, square window set into the door.

Through the window, Jon can see that the worms have stopped, resting patiently in one silver, pulsing heap. Slowly the throng begins to dissipate, creeping off to the edges of the room, vanishing through the floor, crawling back into the office.

“What are they doing?” Martin asks in Jon’s ear. He’s standing so close that Jon can hear how his exhales tremble.

“Waiting,” Jon answers.

“Where’s Tim?” Sasha mutters. “Oh God, he hasn’t—”

“He went out to lunch,” Jon says, hardly noticing that he’s spoken at all.

“He—he doesn’t know,” Martin says quietly.

“Well, call him!” Sasha insists.

“There’s no reception,” Jon says distantly. “No cameras either.”

He stands motionless, listening as Sasha rambles about the fire suppression system, watching as Martin’s fingers travel to his pocket, checking for the corkscrew. From somewhere outside of himself, Jon witnesses his second chance slipping away, watching as he makes the same mistakes all over again. 

He watches as Tim walks into view, and slumps in his desk chair, feet propped up against the edge of Sasha’s desk, oblivious to Martin and Sasha’s shouts of warning.

“Tim!” Sasha screams. “Get out!”

“Tim!” Martin yells, banging against the door.

“Soundproofed,” Jon reminds them.

“She’s there! She’s—” Martin gasps.

“There’s nothing I can do,” Jon mumbles, more to himself than to the others.

“Turn around!” Sasha reaches for the door handle, almost in slow-motion. Jon grabs at her wrist, but she’s already out the door, crushing worms underfoot, hollering Tim’s name.

Jon is solid once more, his limbs his own. “Sasha, wait!” He rushes after her but Martin has already shut the door, barricading his way.

Martin looks at him, pleading. “It’s really bad out there.”

“I know,” Jon breathes.

Jon thinks he just might need another list. Turns out, things are worse than very bad. 

“Sasha’s made it out,” Martin observes, his voice heavy relief.

Something foul and rotted is leaking out of Prentiss’ mouth and all over the files scattered across Martin’s desk. His snow globe collection is, regretfully, not being spared either.

Jon, already feeling helpless enough, can’t quite bring himself to look out the window. Sasha could be headed for Artefact storage any minute now, but until Tim bursts through the wall and guides them down into the tunnels, there’s no hope of reaching her in one piece.

“And Tim?” he asks despite knowing the answer.

“I think I saw him run into your office, where all the—” Martin swallows. “You know.”

“He’ll have the spare CO2 that you hid in there,” Jon says in what he hopes is a comforting tone.

Martin’s jaw drops, staring. “You knew about that?”

Jon shrugs, scrambling for an explanation. “It’s slightly difficult not to notice when you go to grab a file from one of the boxes and end up with a fire extinguisher in your hand.”

“Oh, erm, sorry about that.” Martin drops his gaze, embarrassed. “I just—well, I thought the worms wouldn’t think to look there.”

They’re sitting, backs up against the door. Jon wants to reach out and clasp Martin’s hand, run his fingers over the freckle on Martin’s knuckles like he did so long ago on the sofa in Daisy’s safehouse. But that moment of trust, that leap, is years to come.

“It’s stupid, isn’t it?” Martin is saying, waiting for Jon to say yes, yes it is, like he always does, always used to.

“No, not really,” Jon disagrees. “You’ve saved his life.”

Martin looks at him with that quiet surprise he’d worn after Jon had tacked on an “I love you” to the end of a sentence for the first time, casual as anything.

They’re alone, Jon realises. No one listening in, no audience. No whir of the tape recorder. He hadn’t risked himself to retrieve it from his office this time, hadn’t earned a scar on his leg for his trouble either. Perhaps, this time he’s less focused on the not dying a mystery part, and more focused on the not dying.

Jon reviews his list, and adds a fourth item for consideration.

“Martin, I owe you an apology. Several, actually.”

“Not to be ungrateful, but I’m not sure this is the right time for—”

“Please,” Jon cuts in. He needs to make something right.

“Okay,” Martin nods, his voice small.

“You are not incompetent,” Jon says, although admittedly, it’s not the best opener he could have gone with.

“Uh…thanks?”

Jon shifts so he’s facing Martin. “What I mean is, I’ve been much too quick to criticise you. I’ve been hostile and unprofessional and immature.” Jon coughs. He can’t read the expression on Martin’s face. “To tell you the truth, Martin, I’ve projected my own inadequacies onto you. I’ve endangered all of you because I thought that if I could just ignore it long enough, the fear would go away.”

Martin’s eyes slowly narrow, as he processes Jon’s words.

“So, the whole sceptic was, what, an act? This whole time, while you were rolling your eyes at me for worrying about ghost stories, you knew it was real?” Martin’s words are hollow with disbelief and sharp with betrayal.

“Well, I wouldn’t call them ghost stories. ”

“But you did,” Martin accuses. “You have.”

“No, no you’re right,” Jon says softly. “I’m sorry.”

The wet writhing on the other side of the door fills the silence.

“You’re not inadequate,” Martin finally says, firm. “And this is not your fault.”

Before Jon can reply, the wail of the fire alarm starts up, a low whine at first, and then building as it rises in pitch.

“Sasha,” Jon whispers. She must be on her way to Elias’ office by now.

Come on, Tim, he urges. We’re running out of time.

“You think she’s—well, she wouldn’t just leave us, right?” Martin asks, voice teetering dangerously.

Jon shakes his head. “No, not Sasha.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Martin intones under his breath, trying to convince himself of this.

Right then, there’s a bang that vibrates through the room, setting the hairs on Jon’s arms on end.

Martin leaps to his feet. “What. Was that.” He shoots Jon a wide-eyed, cornered look that says, so much for “we’ll be safe if we stay in here.”

Bang. The wall heaves.

Martin spares a panicked glance out the window. “Jon—”

“It’s not Prentiss,” Jon assures him.

“Then what is it?” Martin hisses.

Bang. Bang. Bang. And the plasterboard splinters.

Martin brandishes his corkscrew, prepared to fight the whole damn world with that twisted piece of metal. God, Jon loves him.

The wall explodes outwards, the burst of noise not exactly doing any favours for Jon’s headache.

When the dust clears, Tim is standing there, triumphant, a canister of CO2 tucked under each arm. “Hi guys!”

“Tim?” Martin gapes. “But you were in the office, how did—”

Jon steps forward urgently. “Listen, Tim, we need to get to Artefact Storage. Sasha needs us there.”

Tim’s eyes are unfocused, his expression blank and dizzy from all the gas. “Sasha? But she got out. I helped her get out.”

“Right, but she came back.”

“Wait. Sasha hates Artefact Storage,” Martin says.

Jon drags a hand through his hair, jittery. “Just…trust me on this one.”

Martin nods warily.

“We’ll take the tunnels,” Jon suggests. “There’s less worms anyway.”

“Tunnels?” Martin glances between Jon and Tim.

“I’m—erm, I’m assuming. It’s the only way that explains how Tim got here unscathed,” Jon adds hastily. 

Martin looks as if about a dozen questions are budding on his tongue, but settles for fixing Jon with a perplexed stare, lips just parted slightly.

“It’s a maze in there,” Tim warns, still out of breath.

Jon is a man too full of memories; he might as well put that to use. “I know the way,” he says.

The air is thin, stale down in the tunnels, and the prickle behind Jon’s eyes has faded into a wispy sort of agony. The three of them walk side by side although the tunnel is barely wide enough to allow it. When Jon’s arm swings, his elbow brushes the cool skin of Martin’s forearm.

“Erm, Jon?” Martin whispers, the words still bouncing off of the stone walls. “Are you sure this is the right direction?”

“Yes.”

Tim, marching along on Jon’s left, fire extinguisher at the ready, remarks, “I think I recognise this corridor.”

Jon scoffs. “There’s nothing to recognise. It all looks the same down here.”

Martin and Tim share an uncertain look.

“I mean—only, the ground’s been sloping downward for a while,” Martin tries again. “And Artefact Storage is upstairs.”

“There’s an exit that lets out just down the hall from Artefact Storage. I’m sure of it.”

“Yeah, well that’s the part I don’t understand,” Tim jumps in. “No one even knew these tunnels existed. ”

A laugh escapes out from between Jon’s teeth, low and delirious. “Trust me, there are many parts you don’t understand.”

Tim halts. “What is that supposed to mean?”

Jon is sunken and transparent all at once. Jon is not supposed to be here. Jon does not deserve a re-do after everything. He can’t. He can’t fix this, can’t find the middle ground between making ripples and drowning beneath the tidal wave. Maybe there’s no point even trying.

Jon, at twenty-nine, is already the Archivist, has already tethered his voice to the tapes, has already been marked, destined, chosen.

This is not a rewrite; this is a cruel, cruel joke, and Jon is the battered, bloody punchline.

That’s when he hears the scream. It’s not Prentiss’ scream, not the one echoed by thousands of small, silver mouths. No, this scream is shrill and human and terrified.

Jon is running before he even notices his feet slapping, beating out a rhythm against the rough-hewn floor.

Sasha is not going to die today.

Sasha is not going to die today.

Sasha is not going to die today.

“We’re close,” Jon promises, not really sure to whom. “We’re—”

The tunnel comes to an abrupt stop, and Martin’s fingers close around Jon’s wrist, yanking him backward. Jon tugs impatiently, but Martin has gone pale beside him.

“Sasha, we need to…” Jon trails off. 

They’re in a square room, coated in such a thick layer of dust that Jon can hardly inhale. A wooden chair is positioned at its center, facing the opposite wall. There is someone sitting in the chair, dull, gray hair pulled into a severe bun. 

“Shit,” Tim mutters. “Is that—”

“Yes,” Jon confirms. “I believe so.”

So much for Item Three.

Martin is so silent that Jon wonders if he’s still breathing.

“I, uh, don’t think this is the way to Artefact Storage,” Tim says.

Jon floats back down the tunnel the way they came, the stone, and then wood, and then cement all one interminable haze. Time shoves him off balance, trips him, catches him by the shoulder and pulls, but Jon holds Martin’s hand as they run, Tim close behind.

Jon doesn’t exactly know when they paused, but when next he blinks, Martin is watching him with concern etched on his brow.

“What?” Jon asks.

“No, you, er—you seemed sort of gone for a while back there,” Martin says, suddenly very interested in his shoes.

“I think,” Jon frowns. “I think I was.”

“I’m guessing this is a trapdoor,” Tim calls.

Jon squints into the dim light of the tunnel, turning to see Tim running his hands over grooves set into a low wall.

“Wait,” Jon murmurs. “Tim.”

But Tim is already prying the door open, light flooding in through the growing crack.

Jon hears the wails of the fire alarm first, hears the slithering, and smells damp earth, rotted soil, and filth.

Jon wonders if there’s enough time for him to make another list. 

“Archivist,” comes Prentiss’ hoarse, delighted rasp.

Probably not, Jon decides.

The worms surge forward, one wriggling, swarming mass.

Jon watches them rise up to greet him, and remembers that glimmer of hope, just a small, naive, nascent thing. He sees it for what it is now—not hope, but delusion, because swapping out a couple sentences doesn’t change the story, not when the characters don’t have much of a say in their fates to begin with.

Jon will wake up this afternoon in quarantine, bandaged head to toe. Jon will live it all again, and then Jon supposes, that will be it. One last ride on the carousel.

He hears the hiss of the fire suppression system, and the first worm breaks through his skin.

That’s funny, Jon thinks as his vision swims, murky. I remember it hurting more the first time around.

Somewhere, a kettle whistles.

And Jon wakes up to his second second chance, a paper clip digging into his cheek.

Chapter Text

Slowly, and carefully, so carefully, Jon peels the paper clip from the crease in his skin, half expecting it to scar, deep and ragged, just like—

His breath hitching, Jon traces the insides of his palms, turning his hands over, searching for the marks that should be there, had been there. He rubs at his eyes, trying to dispel the shadows from the edges of the room, and examines his wrists, forearms, jaw. Jon’s fingertips meet smooth flesh where he anticipates craters.

He wades through the bog for a memory, any memory. 

In case the trap door opens back into the Archives and Prentiss is there to kill us.

In as many words, yes. Tim?

No, that’s not right. Jon pauses, something loose rattling around in his skull. That hadn’t been—it hadn’t gone like that this time. The words had been stuffed slightly differently into their mouths. Hadn’t they?

Jon groans, his head reeling. This grogginess, it’s worse than any hangover he’s ever had, only there’s no miracle tonic, no blessed cure for it other than bludgeoning his thoughts into place the old-fashioned way.

Item One: he had heard Sasha scream (well, not that he had been certain that the scream had indubitably been hers, but taking into account the substantial evidence in favour of such a conclusion along with what can only be cited as past experience —)

Jon’s hands fly to the thrashing at his temples. This is not how lists are done. Bullet points, not pointless paragraphs. Jon hasn’t fallen back on this sort of pretentious, academic fluff, this smokescreen of respectability in years, and there’s no use in reviving old habits, not when the solution that Jon is looking for won’t be found in any style guide.

Agitated, he starts again.

Item One: Sasha died this time.

Item Two: Tim learned what it feels like to be burrowed into. (Item 2A: so did Martin. Jon witnessed his horror first-hand, the way his nostrils had flared, his arm outstretched, holding himself steady against the tunnel wall.)

Item Three: They found Gertrude. (Item 3A: Jon assumes, by then, the shock had set in.)

 

Jon had woken up in a hospital bed the first time, nurses in hazmat suits watching blinding monitors, listening for the incessant beeps and occasional blips that had been indecipherable to Jon. They had mummified him, it seemed. They had prodded him—a swab here, a poke there. The world had been muffled and ringing, obscured behind the echo of Prentiss’ final scream in his ears.

Jon sits in his office now, not wrapped in gauze, but shrouded in a blanket, loose thread tickling his chin. The floor is bare, not a worm corpse in sight. And on the desk is a tape recorder. 

This is that day, Jon realises. Again. (Again.)

Or rather, this is a brand new 29th July and Jon is its only veteran.

Jon pauses, not quite sure of what he’s listening for until gentle knocking falls against the door.

“Come in,” he sighs.

“Wasn’t sure if you were sleeping in here.” Martin hovers in the entrance to the office, same tray, same mug—a horrid thing with “T.G.I.F.” printed across its side in Comic Sans. That is one item that Jon did not miss doing away with during the post-infestation purge. He wrinkles his nose distastefully.

“Good morning, Martin,” Jon says, the ache in his bones subsiding.

“Good morning,” Martin responds cautiously. “Did you—you slept well, then?”

“Yes.”

Martin deposits the tray on Jon’s desk. “That’s good.”

And Jon wants to tell him so badly. You are my reason.

Suddenly, a new fear germinates, sprouting within the part of himself that Jon allows to be selfish. What if? What if this all goes sideways? What if fixing this means that Jon will never have lived those crucial moments in the safehouse, those nuggets of time that made him and Martin an us?

It took almost two years of crisis and trauma to even make us compatible, Martin had said. Jon had hated agreeing, but some piece of him can’t help wondering if the man that comes out the other end of a long line of 29th July will be his Martin.

Jon wisely decides that he’d rather not think about that at the moment.

“Thank you for the tea,” Jon says quietly.

“Oh, it’s no problem.” Martin flashes him a feeble smile on his way out, leaving Jon with nothing but regrets and that God awful mug.

Jon sits there for a while, watching his tea grow cold. The crick in his neck returns with a vengeance and he loses his grip on time, giving his tense knuckles a rest.

Jon’s hands aren’t carved like they used to be, but his chest—his chest swells, that faint sheen of hope returning. He doesn’t dare question it, doesn’t dwell on the torturous thrum of memories too many for the cranial space they’re meant to occupy, doesn’t linger on his vague weightlessness.

Instead, Jon swears to wring this last chance dry.

Because this isn’t Jon’s last chance. No, this chance belongs to Sasha, to Tim, to everyone who’s ever been caught inside the jaws of this Archive, chewed up between its molars, and spit out.

Jon lifts the tape recorder, cradling it in cupped hands for a moment, and promptly dumps it in the rubbish bin beside his desk. “Don’t even think about it,” he threatens, giving the tape recorder a pointed look.

“I know it’s not great being stuck with technology that isn’t much younger than we are, but you really should be kinder to your fellow 90s kids.”

Jon glances up, startled at the intrusion. Tim is standing in the doorway, arms crossed, shaking his head in disappointment. As always, he appears endlessly amused.

Is it noon already?

“It’s broken,” Jon says sharply.

Tim raises his hands in surrender. “No need to get so defensive.”

“You’re taking the tape recorder’s side over mine, really?” Jon feels a prickle of annoyance, but he’s still not over the shock of seeing Tim alive and unscarred again, and suppressing the maniacal smile forming on his lips is the hardest thing Jon’s had to do recently.

Okay, well, maybe top ten. Top twenty.

Top fifty?

Tim shrugs. “Someone’s got to stick up for the little guy.” He smirks. “Not you, Jon. I mean the other little guy.”

“Yes, right, very funny, Tim,” Jon says through clenched teeth.

“Thank you.”

If Jon didn’t know any better, he’d call the grin on Tim’s face downright wicked.

“What is it that you wanted again?” Jon asks, although two versions of this conversation already float in some other layer of his memory.

“I was going to ask if you wanted anything from the Korean place on the corner,” Tim offers, jerking his thumb in what Jon assumes to be the approximate direction of said Korean place.

“No, thank you.”

“You sure? Last chance.”

Last chance, indeed.

“Actually, Tim, I—” Jon clears his throat. “I thought you might want the day off.”

“Why would I want that?”

Jon falters. “It just seems like the right time of year for a holiday.”

Tim’s eyebrows bunch together, suspicious. “This isn’t some weird way of firing me, right?”

“No, it’s—” Jon sighs. “Never mind.”

Tim scrutinises him. “Good, ‘cause I hope you know that you’re not getting rid of me that easy, boss.” He punctuates his words with a firm nod, and before Jon can even think to argue, he’s on his way out of the Archives.

It’s fine. It’s fine, Jon reassures himself. There’s still plenty of time to—

Somehow, Jon hears the spider’s light, eight-pronged steps atop the shelf before he sees it. Jon is out of his chair before he’s entirely sure of what he intends to do. There’s a moment in which he is a passenger in his own body, along for the ride as something else takes over—instinct, eldritch entity, the tides of history (not that Jon can even attempt to pinpoint the difference).

His hand hits the shelf with a thwack, and everything crumbles. Jon feels the flutter of documents against the side of his trousers as he comes back into himself, muscles tingling and numb.

“Alright?” Sasha ducks in, surveying the whirlwind of files carpeting the office’s floor.

“There was a spider,” Jon answers. “I tried to kill it, but I, erm, got the shelf instead.”

“Oh, it was bound to happen eventually.” Sasha shrugs and gives him a pitying glance. “Cheap shelves.

“They send all the sturdy ones up to the Library,” Jon complains bitterly. The equity of the Institute’s furniture distribution must be the least of his current problems, but it brings some tiny relief to gripe about something normal and human-shaped for once.

“We should plan a heist,” Sasha says, her eyes electric. “Martin can be our diversion, you and I will sneak the shelf down to the Archive, and Tim can bribe any witnesses.” She grins, proud of her ingenuity.

Jon takes a second to cement her features in his mind: polished glasses slipping down her nose, long, curly hair tucked behind one ear, the small dimple that dents the left side of her smile. He won’t forget. He won’t.

“I doubt Elias would let us get away with that,” Jon says truthfully.

Sasha isn’t listening as she drifts over to the collapsed shelf. She reaches out to touch the exposed drywall, fingers paused above the burst of fractures. “I think we’d better steal a new wall while we’re at it,” she comments, her voice light and teasing.

“There are worms in there,” Jon blurts.

Sasha recoils. “What?”

“I’m not—not sure how long they’ve been waiting, months maybe.”  The world bucks and tilts beneath Jon’s feet, time crashing over him like a wave, but he manages to keep his head above the salty water.

Sasha blinks at him, sceptical. “This is an exterior wall. That’s impossible.”

Jon thinks he can hear them already, or perhaps it’s his overstuffed hippocampus at work once again. “It’s not,” he insists.

“Just yesterday you told Tim not to fuss over the fact that a dozen of those things were chasing him into the Archive.” 

Jon wants to tell her yesterday was years ago, but behind Sasha, the first gleam of silver flesh pushes through the gash in the wall.

Sasha must see his eyes go wide, his cheeks go taut, because she turns back for another look just as Jon utters the well-practiced syllable: “Run.”

“How did you know?”

The other times that Jon has lived these tense few minutes in the document storage room, Sasha had paced back and forth, intermittently returning to the door and its small, clouded window; today, Sasha sits cross-legged on the floor, her eyes fixed to Jon’s face.

“How did you know to warn me?” she repeats.

Jon, who grew up playing the smart-ass rather than playing dumb, freezes for a moment. “Sorry?”

“You told me the worms were waiting,” Sasha accuses. “Inside the wall, you knew.” It’s not the you-were-watching-my-house tone that Jon had become so used to hearing from Tim, not like Martin’s desperate cries of you-swore-to-me.

Somehow, Jon can tell that this scalding, precise frustration is of the square peg in the round hole variety. Sasha likes making things make sense. Jon, who is fighting a losing battle with the past, is not one of these things that can make sense. There is no scientific method-ing the way out of this one.

Jon raises his shoulders in a half-hearted shrug, pinned beneath both Martin’s curious gaze and Sasha’s determined one.

“I—er, well…” Jon glances at Martin for support, but Martin is blank and bewildered, watching from the sidelines.

“Gut feeling, I suppose?” Jon manages.

Sasha squints at him cynically.

“What matters is that we’re all safe in here,” Martin interjects, always the mediator. He presses his face to the window. “I think most of the worms have retreated into the office.”

“Not all of us are safe in here,” Jon says, grim. Christ, he wishes his Martin were here to scold him for being too ominous.

“Christ, is Tim still out there?” Sasha asks, the words hushed and cramped in her mouth.

“He went for lunch. Maybe he won’t be back for a while,” Martin says, making an attempt at optimism.

Sasha is shaking her head, almost as if she’s trying to shake some sense into the world, jar it back into a correct orbit. “No, he can’t come back here. We have to warn him.”

Martin pats at his pockets, coming up empty. “I don’t—I left my phone on my desk.”

“Don’t bother,” Jon says. “There’s no service.”

The storage room descends into silence. Jon’s eyes track Martin back and forth as he paces. Every now and then, with Martin’s arm swinging at just the right angle, Jon catches sight of the corkscrew tucked against his palm.

Martin’s footsteps halt abruptly. “I’m a little surprised you’re not recording this,” he says as if the thought has just occurred to him. “For evidence purposes, I mean. I’ve got an extra tape recorder if you want to—”

“No,” Jon answers immediately. “I think we have enough to worry about, Martin.”

More silence. Jon had almost forgotten what it was like without the constant background chatter, endless reports on each and every one of the Eye’s victims. Like tuning into a radio broadcast, volume turned down a bit, only to have the signal finally fizzle out entirely, leaving the room more still than it had been to begin with.

Jon finds the quiet oddly peaceful (not counting the sounds of insistent, squirming parasites on the other side of the door, of course.)

“Statement of Sasha James, archival assistant at the Magnus Institute. Statement begins,” Sasha says hollowly. “Mum was right. I should have just been a librarian.”

Martin wheezes, stifling a laugh behind his hand, and suddenly the room is a shade or two less dim, at least the way Jon sees it.

Sasha bites back a wry smile. “Statement ends.”

Martin clears his throat. “Statement of Martin Blackwood, archival assistant. Statement taken direct from—”

 “You don’t have to say the whole thing.” Sasha waves her hand, urging him on.

“Oh, right.” Martin turns the corkscrew over in his hands. “Statement begins.” He inhales sharply. “This really sucks.”

Sasha nods in agreement.

“Statement ends, I guess,” Martin says.

“Are you going to do one, Jon?” Sasha asks.

“Statements are, erm, not really my thing anymore,” Jon admits. There’d been a time that he’d hungered for them, another when he’d brimmed with them, spilling over the side. Now, Jon is too sea-sick to stomach the hum of the tape recorder overlapped by the monotonous drone of narration.

“Shit,” Sasha whispers, springing up and darting over to the door. “It’s Tim.”

Sure enough, Tim has just marched in, a takeaway bag in his grasp. 

“What’s he doing?” Jon wonders aloud.

Instead of returning to his own workspace, Tim is hunched over Martin’s desk, rifling through one of the drawers. After a few seconds of scavenging, he produces a thin, cylindrical object.

“He’s—he’s stealing my pens,” Martin gapes, scandalised. “Are you seeing this?”

“Prentiss is back,” Sasha breathes.

“Where?” Jon leans in towards the window.

“God, what are those things doing to her eyes?” Martin murmurs, his voice stiff with disgust.

“I’m sure it’s entirely consensual,” Jon points out.

“Tim!” Sasha yells.

“It’s soundproofed,” Jon says bluntly, praying that for once they’ll actually listen to him.

“Tim!” Martin shouts, waving his hands frantically. “Behind you!”

“He can’t hear you.” Jon squeezes his forehead lightly, disorientated. He can feel the minutes tugging at his core, but Jon digs his fingernails in and rides it out.

“Run!” Sasha calls again.

That’s my line, isn’t it? Jon thinks, near-delirious.

Jon is watching this time, paying the right kind of attention, so he sees how Sasha’s chin hardens, how her shoulder flexes as she reaches for the door handle. “Screw this,” she says through gritted teeth, and takes the first step out the door.

Jon is ready. Jon is right behind her this time.

“Wait, Jon!” Martin’s startled voice comes from behind, but Jon doesn’t look back.

Tim, busy rearranging the contents of Martin’s desk drawer, is oblivious to Prentiss’ slow, purposeful approach, a trail of worms left in her wake. 

“Tim, look out!” Sasha warns.

Tim straightens, and slams the drawer shut, caught red-handed. “Huh?”

“Do you hear their song?” The words emanate from somewhere deep in Prentiss’ throat.

Tim spins slowly, his fingers going slack. Martin’s pen clatters to the ground.

Sasha sprints full-tilt toward Tim, and with arms outstretched, she tackles him. They hit the floor hard, flattening at least a dozen words on impact.

Jon moves to help them up, but a cool touch coils around his elbow, and he flinches. Martin is standing beside him, one hand on Jon’s arm, the other wrapped around the corkscrew so tight that his knuckles have gone white. “You’re going to get yourself killed,” he says, voice low and shaky.

Jon spares a glance over his shoulder at the document storage room. The door is hanging wide open. “You weren’t supposed to follow me,” Jon says crossly. “You would have been safe in there.”

“I wasn’t going to be left in there alone, ” Martin protests.

Tim groans as he and Sasha struggle to their feet.

“Jon,” Sasha hisses.

“Alone is better than dead,” Jon snaps.

“Jon,” Sasha says, more urgently this time.

“What?” Jon turns away from Martin, exasperated.

Sasha tilts her head, indicating the ground, and Jon looks down.

“Shit.”

The floor is alive, squirming beneath their feet. Something slick and flailing brushes past Jon’s ankle. Jon tries to lift his foot, but silver bodies tether him to the ground, encircling his leg higher and higher. Fleshy, suffocating armour coating his calf, his shin, the bend of his knee.

“Archivist,” Jane Prentiss coos, hardly two meters away by now. Jon can see the holes punctured in her grey skin. “Listen how they sing for you.”

Jon doesn’t hear the Corruption’s song. He hears Martin’s choked, horrified breaths as he brushes the worms from his trousers. He hears Sasha’s stomps, as she kicks at the writhing waves lapping at her limbs. He hears Tim’s mutters: die, just die already.

That’s funny, Jon thinks as the floor rises up to swallow him. It didn’t hurt so much the last time.

Somewhere, a kettle whistles.

Fuck.

Jon scrapes the paper clip from the side of his cheek.

One more time. He’ll—he’ll do this one more time.

“The room is sealed,” Martin is telling Sasha. “I made sure of it when I first moved in.”

Jon folds in on himself. His skull feels like it’s splitting. Inky fireworks burst across his vision, spraying the already dark room with black. “He’s right,” Jon forces out. “Climate-controlled. Strong door.”

Sasha opens her mouth to argue.

“And no,” Jon interrupts. “They won’t be getting in through the air con.”

Sasha just stares at him, her expression unreadable.

“We should be safe in here,” Martin adds brightly, or as brightly as is possible when separated from a horde of parasitic invertebrates by nothing but a door and four walls that aren’t nearly as solid as one would expect.

“Not all of us,” Jon corrects. The words come out sounding less foreboding, and more tinged with fatigue. If Jon is anything, this third ride on the carousel, he is tired, tired to the very pit of his being.

“Oh, God,” Sasha says. “Tim.”

“He was at—at lunch, right?” Martin asks.

“Korean,” Jon says quietly.

“He doesn’t know,” Sasha realises. “He could be back any minute and he doesn’t know.”

“He took his phone with him,” Martin says quickly, hands bunched around the sleeves of his jumper. “You think he’ll answer? There’s still time to—”

“It’s no use,” Jon says. “We won’t get a signal in here.” He hates this part, hates having to watch as Martin’s face falls, as Sasha sinks to the floor.

“What about the others?” Sasha asks suddenly.

Jon cocks his head, confused. “What others?”

“Research, Artefact Storage, the Library, Rosie—” Sasha breaks off her list and gives Jon a pointed look. “They’re all in danger.”

“No, er, Prentiss doesn’t want them,” Jon explains, not sure how much he should reveal. He doesn’t want to be subjected to another one of Sasha’s interrogations.

“Well, then who does she want?” Martin questions, clearly unconvinced.

Jon shakes his head lightly, and exhales, “Us.”

Martin watches him apprehensively, cheeks puffed out just slightly.

“Or the—or the Archive, really?” Jon amends. Or me. “Just a hypothesis.”

“A hunch in a sweater vest and glasses is still a hunch,” Sasha says.

“It’s—Tim’s back!” Martin stammers from his post at the door.

Sure enough, Tim is leaning up against his desk, vaguely bored, as he scrolls on his phone.

“Tim!” Sasha pounds against the window. “Turn around, just—”

“Soundproofed,” Jon sighs. His eyes are glued to Sasha’s fingers, the dent in her frown. He needs to see when she makes the decision, when it rewrites the planes of her face.

There. There.

“Screw this,” Sasha says and shoves the door open.

The conversations shift, the timings waver, but this is something constant—Sasha making a decision, charging toward peril. Few things are truly invariable in Jon’s eternal 29th July hellscape besides that bloody paper clip, Martin’s soft offerings of tea, Tim’s odd insistence on Korean food, and that damn spider. And this.

Perhaps, Jon is too much of a coward to really understand it.

Sasha hurtles out of the document storage room, arms swinging wildly. “Tim, look out!”

Jon follows, feet sliding against the floor, but the rest of his body slams to a halt. Jon looks down at the fingers wrapped around his wrist. He tugs once, twice. “Let go,” he says petulantly. Jon reckons that if anyone deserves a tantrum, he does.

Martin steps around him, blocking Jon’s path to the door. His fingertips are pressed against Jon’s pulse point, and Jon knows that Martin can feel the fluttering of Jon’s erratic heartbeat.

Martin fixes him with a stubborn frown. “It’s really bad out there.” He says this like a thesis, like he’s expecting Jon to demand an argument, sources cited and everything. But the last thing Jon wants to do is to fight him.

Jon feels old, so old. He sighs, “I know.”

Martin takes in a deep, steadying breath. “I think Tim and Sasha made it out okay. Most of the worms seem to be headed for your office.”

“Can I tell you the truth, Martin?” Jon asks lightly, trying not to bite a hole through his lip.

“Uh—sure,” Martin says hesitantly.

“I think I might be a ghost,” Jon confesses. 

Martin wisely remains silent.

“I mean,” Jon says, growing more and more agitated. “I can’t remember anything between the Panopticon and waking up at my desk, I can’t escape this place, and it feels like I’m haunting my own memories. Nothing changes. ”

“Panopticon?”

Jon waves his hand dismissively. “Never mind, we haven’t gotten to that part yet.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghost stories,” Martin says cautiously.

“I do.”

“But you—” Martin’s features grapple with each other as the realisation sets in. “Why pretend like none of it was real?”

Jon shrugs. “Because I hate the person fear turns me into.”

Martin slides down against the wall, his shoulder brushing Jon’s. 

Jon stares at his hands, folded in his lap, and waits for time to take him by surprise, wrestle him and win.

Martin taps Jon on the shoulder, and Jon’s whole world narrows to that point of contact, that tiny spot just off of his collarbone.

“You’re not a ghost, you know,” Martin volunteers. “You’re too solid.”

As soon as Martin mentions it, Jon is suddenly aware of the comfortable weight of his skeleton, anchored, at least momentarily, to this when.

“Fine, not a ghost.” Jon surrenders with a tired smile. “Not a ghost, but perhaps a very unlucky time traveler.”

Martin blinks at him. “Sorry?”

And that’s when the screech of the fire alarm cuts in.

Kettle. Paper clip.

If Jon’s third loop was a bit of a blur, this next one could be classified as a dripping watercolour, muddled hues melting into one another. Like colours, but if colours hated me. Jon had said that once. He finds that the relationship isn’t any less hostile now.

“We should be safe in here,” Martin is saying, eyes roving over the walls, searching for microscopic fissures, weaknesses in structural integrity. There aren’t any, but Jon, being well-acquainted with paranoia, knows that Martin’s mind will conjure something up.

“Not all of us,” Jon recites. It feels almost like a dance by now. Jon is choreographed to trip over his own feet.

Sasha’s eyes go wide. “Wait, Tim isn’t—Tim isn’t still out there, is he?”

“He left for lunch like half an hour ago?” Martin supplies.

“Christ,” Sasha mumbles.

“We won’t be able to call him from in here. And the room is soundproofed by the way,” Jon says, figuring he might as well cover all the bases while he’s at it.

“Right, well,” Martin brainstorms. “We could leave a note maybe?”

“A note,” Jon says flatly.

“Yeah, a sticky note on his desk.”

Sasha sighs, sympathetic. “Martin, he’d have to come inside to read that and by then—”

“Oh, oh, of course,” Martin agrees, turning red. “Sorry, it’s hard to think with all the—” He gestures vaguely at the walls, at the sound of squirming all around them. 

This is Jon’s first time being the only one watching the window when Tim returns to the Archive and reclines in his desk chair. “He’s back.”

“Tim!” Martin shouts.

“Tim!” Sasha echoes, fingers splayed against the door. “She’s behind you! Prentiss is behind you!”

Jon sags, defeated. They never listen, do they? The ache in his head blinds him with searing pain anew and the room spins with shadows. Jon doubles over and suddenly Martin’s arm is around his shoulders, supporting him. “Hey, hey, are you okay?”

“M’fine,” Jon says weakly.

That small bit of closeness is enough to make Jon solid again. For the most part.

Martin peers into Jon’s face, searching. “You don’t look fine.”

“I’m fine,” Jon insists.

“Screw this.” Sasha is swinging open the door.

Jon lurches forward, and no one, no one, is going to stop him this time. Only, he’s still leaning against Martin, still has Martin’s hands braced against his bicep, so when Jon stumbles after Sasha, so does a terrified Martin.

“Tim! Look out!” Sasha hollers.

Jon is clear-headed enough now to stand on his own but Martin is not letting go.  “Jon, what the hell—”

“Listen to me, Martin,” Jon begs, words only gaining momentum as they roll from his mouth. “Listen, I need you to activate the fire suppression system.”

“What?”

“Maintenance, one floor down, big lever. You can’t miss it.”

Martin hesitates.“What about you?” 

Jon pries his arm out of Martin’s grasp. “I’ve got to make sure that Sasha doesn’t—”

“Do you hear their song?”

Jon spins around to find Tim and Sasha sprawled out on the floor atop a mound of worm corpses, Prentiss drawing near, in that crooked, undulating glide.

“Run!” Jon shouts, not exactly directed toward anyone in particular.

Tim and Sasha, it seems, don’t need to be told twice. One moment, Tim is on his feet, dusting worm flesh from his sleeves, and the next, he’s darting into Jon’s office. Sasha’s head swivels, surveying any possible escape routes, and suddenly she’s running, long ribbons of hair tearing stripes through the stale air—a mix of that old book smell and fetid earth.

Jon is close behind her. Jon is somewhere else entirely, stretched tight between am and will.

“Not now,” Jon scolds the sparks arcing through his mind. His temporal migraine stubbornly refuses to listen.

Jon puts on an extra burst of speed, closing the distance between his pounding feet and Sasha’s heels. He careens through hallways, takes stairs two at a time, not sure of where the next flight will let out or even which way is up and which is down.

Something like static, and vicious, clogs Jon’s thoughts. He is no longer in the stairwell. He stands in a room, warehouse shelves pushed up against the wall, neon hazard stickers pasted to pretty much every available surface.

“No,” he chokes out. This is not how it’s supposed to go. Skipping a stone is supposed to make ripples. Where are Jon’s fucking ripples?

Sasha, noticing the numb horror plastered on Jon’s face, grimaces. “I know, I know. I’m not exactly a fan of Artefact Storage either but there are hardly any worms up here. It might be a safe place to lie low for now.”

“No,” Jon says again.

Sasha always pulled the fire alarm. Sasha always went up to Elias’ office. But this round, the timeline is all wrong.

“Hey, Jon, is this that table you were talking about?” Sasha’s voice drifts over from the next aisle.

Jon blinks hard. Hello? I see you. Show yourself.

“Don’t—don’t look at its design,” he says urgently.

“It’s an optical illusion,” Sasha observes. “Not even a particularly good optical illusion.”

“Don’t look at it.” Jon repeats firmly, rushing in the direction of her voice, shelves looming overhead. “Sasha?”

The static returns, a crackling thrum that makes Jon’s teeth chatter. Jon winces as the tension at the back of his neck intensifies but he can’t afford to freeze up. Not now. He barrels into the next aisle.

“Sasha?”

Empty.

Farther down the aisle, the table is partially obscured behind a stack of wooden crates, each painted with large, sloppy red Xs. (Jon knows better than to wonder about the items stored within.) Despite this, the table’s fractured engraving is still visible from where Jon is standing. He averts his eyes.

“Sasha?” Jon calls, dreading a response, knowing that whoever—whatever speaks next will not be her.

Jon waits. Something in a ceramic jar on the shelf opposite him groans, and Jon takes a precautionary step backward.

And then: “Jon?”

The voice dips and peaks, almost sing-song. Jon’s chest flares with a sense of wrongness. He can’t recall what Sasha’s voice is supposed to sound like, and he remembers less and less of her face by the second (her eyes—what color were they again?) but Jon knows that this cadence is distinctly not Sasha.

Jon swallows around a sandpaper tongue.

“Jon?” The thing that is not Sasha beckons sweetly.

He runs.

It’s not like it was after Gertrude’s body in the tunnels during that first re-do. Jon doesn’t float; he is leaden in every footstep, every stair climbed. He doesn’t know where he’s headed but he winds up back in the Archive (as he always does), wheezing, chest heaving, and too out of breath to notice how the floor begins to sway beneath his feet. Too exhausted to wonder if Martin even made it to Maintenance in one piece.

Damp, wrinkled skin closes around his legs. Jon rolls his eyes, more annoyed than anything else. He doesn’t deserve a fate as kind as this one. Sasha has just been erased, scraped from the surface of the bloody Earth. And it was all his fault. Again. (Again. Again. Again.)

The first worm pierces his skin. Jon doesn’t bother thinking much of anything. He supposes he’s used to not being used to it by now.

Chapter Text

Somewhere, a kettle whistles.

Jon rubs at his cheek, dislodging the paper clip. It clatters against the table, a metallic, tinny sound. Jon’s head throbs and he sits with that ache for a moment.

On the desk is a statement. Jon’s eyes slide over a case number in bold and settle on the staple in the upper left-hand corner. Perfectly centred. Perfectly angled. Jon is going purely off of circumstantial evidence, and maybe that heavy guilt in his gut, but he recognises this as Sasha’s precision. Perhaps the last thing she ever stapled, and it’s on his desk, waiting to greet him at the start of every loop.

Because that’s what this is—not another ride on the carousel, not a rewrite, not really even proper retribution. This is a loop: unbroken, unending, and most of all unfair.

But Jon knows better than to ask time to be fair.

“Hey, I’m heading out to that Korean place that Sasha won’t shut up about,” Tim is saying. “Want anything?”

Jon blinks, trying to force his eyelids to stop twitching. His eyes feel like they’ve glazed over.

“No, I already had something to eat,” Jon lies easily. “But thank you, Tim.”

When was the last time that he ate? When was the last time that he hadn’t just ground his molars against each other, but sunk them into something? When was the last time he needed to?

“You sure?” Tim watches him hesitantly.

There’s concern tangled in his lashes, Jon realises, having only ever mistaken Tim’s repetitive questioning as a nuisance. Jon wonders if this sort of caretaker’s paranoia is a contagion, with Martin as its patient zero.

Or maybe Jon was always this bad from the start; maybe they could tell, even now.

“Perhaps something small,” Jon surrenders. “I’m really not that hungry.”

Tim nods, having received his marching orders. “I’ll surprise you. And if you don’t love it you can blame Sasha.”

“Right.”

Tim backs out of the office, still making his argument, “I mean, really some of her tastes are questionable to say the least—”

“Mhm.”

“You’ve got to see the blasphemous way she eats pizza,” Tim says, eyes round with revulsion.

“I’ll have to take your word for it.”

Tim catches himself on the door frame. “Did I tell you about what Rosie said about the new CO2?”

Jon traces his forked memories back, back, back. He taps his knuckles to his desk, matter-of-fact. “I’ve already handled it.”

Tim tilts his head, impressed. “That was fast. Rosie mentioned it to me not even fifteen minutes ago.”

“Someone has to get things done around here,” Jon says, perhaps more bitterly than he meant to. Still, it’s true. Jon is doing this alone because he has to.

“Okay, ow.” Tim raises his palm to his chest, wounded.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Jon protests.

“I hope not.” Tim lifts a hand in farewell. “See you later, boss.”

“Yeah,” Jon mumbles.

Mere seconds after Tim has disappeared from sight, the nape of Jon’s neck tingles, hair bristling. Jon knows before he spins in his chair that the spider watches him from the shelf. Jon feels that familiar pull, a drawing in as powerful as the tide. Instinct demands that he swat at the arachnid, splashing his mind with triumphant images of its broken body beneath his fingers. This moment is scripted, stage directions capitalised.

Kill it, some part of him urges.

He should, shouldn’t he? One last round of good old smiting. After all, if there’s a spider that deserves a merciless end, it’s this one. Jon frowns, suddenly cautious. It’s quite possible that he’s become quite accustomed to justifying his murder sprees as of late. 

And if he holds back this time? The hypothetical makes Jon pause.

The spider scuttles across the shelf, brushing past manila files, and stills, almost expectant.

Jon places two fingers at the center of his forehead, pressing down on his lingering headache. It would be so blissfully simple to just give in and retrace the prescribed steps. But Jon runs his thumb over that if, foolishly optimistic. Is he capable of staying his arm against the loop’s persuasion? Will it even matter? Jon listens for an answer in the space between his breaths, and finally he turns away from the temptation of the spider, hands folded and shaking atop his desk.

Please, please let this work, Jon hopes, not sure if pleading will do any good.

A dull clunk and the fluttering of fallen pages tear Jon from his thoughts. Horrified, Jon forces himself to glance behind him. The shelf, perfectly intact just seconds ago, sits caved in on itself. Jon’s eyelid twitches but, even with his eye narrowed, he can see the fissures in the wall.

“Alright?” Sasha chirps from the doorway.

Jon looks from her to the dented drywall and back. “I didn’t touch it.”

Sasha takes one glimpse at the collapsed shelf and shrugs good-naturedly. “Cheap shelves.”

Jon doesn’t disagree, but somehow he suspects that the quality of manufacturing isn’t even the half of it.

Somewhere, a kettle whistles.

Jon’s fingers scamper across his cheekbone, frantic, and the paper clip falls soundlessly. He stares at its metallic glint, nestled in the folds of his jumper.

He didn’t touch the shelf. He didn’t.

Jon’s lungs burn with despair. Perhaps there is no escaping his fate. His fingertips brush the side of his face, ghosting over the small dent left in the skin there. Perhaps he was always destined to be marked, and one trivial act of mercy, one restrained hand, won’t change that.

On the desk is a tape recorder. It strikes Jon as impatient, and it just so happens that Jon is no longer in a merciful mood. In one swift movement, he dashes the tape recorder against the floor, crushing it underfoot, as he failed to do to the spider.

He knows the tape recorder will be back, perfectly unharmed, at the start of the next loop. As will Jon.

Soft knuckles collide with the door.

“Come in, Martin.”

The door opens, accompanied by the fragile clink of ceramic. “Sorry,” Martin enters tentatively. “I wasn’t sure if you were sleeping in here.”

“No, I was—I was awake,” Jon says, scratching absentmindedly at his cheek.

“Oh. Good.”

A manic desperation seizes Jon by the throat at the sight of Martin. Jon wants to hold him again, to apologise to a Martin who remembers Jon’s many, many mistakes.

As Martin sets down the tray with the tea, Jon stands and catches himself on the desk, dizzy. “Can you tell Tim and Sasha to meet me here?” he says breathlessly. “I have something urgent to discuss with you all.”

Martin swallows. “Now?”

Jon nods. “Now.”

His three assistants have arranged themselves in an evenly-spaced row before Jon’s desk, awaiting his judgement. Sasha, on Jon’s right, is rapt, curious as always, with a pencil tucked behind her ear and half-tangled in her hair. On Jon’s left, Tim has crossed his arms, looking mildly inconvenienced. Between the two of them, Martin’s features are set with dread, hands clasped behind his back.

With the entirety of his staff assembled, Jon clears his throat. “Thank you all for—er, joining me.”

“Is this like a performance review thing?” Tim asks, straight to the point.

Martin shrinks in on himself.

“No, it’s nothing like that,” Jon clarifies. “This is more of a…case-related issue.”

“Why, has something new come up in the Ramao case?” Sasha asks.

“No, actually,” Jon answers. “Look, this is going to sound mad but—”

He inhales, trying to steady his fraying nerves. “There is going to be an attack on the Archives. Today. Well, an infestation really, but all of you are in grave danger unless we—”

“An attack?” Martin interrupts.

“Yes,” Jon confirms. “Jane Prentiss and her worms have been hiding within the Institute for some time now. You won’t be safe until you’re far, far away from here.”

“Why target the Archive?” Sasha leans forward, her eyes locked onto Jon’s.

“How do you know?” Tim wonders, his voice tight with suspicion.

“You’re not listening,” Jon says, frustrated.

“How do you know all this?” Tim repeats.

Jon pushes his hair back from his forehead. Might as well get it off his chest. “I know you won’t feel inclined to believe me, but I’m—I’ve been reliving the same day, this day, over and over again.”

Tim gives Martin a look that says I-told-you-that-he’s-completely-lost-it clear as day.

“It’s Friday,” Martin starts lightly. “Maybe you should head home early, take advantage of the weekend to get some rest.”

Jon shakes his head adamantly. “I’m telling you the truth.”

“How many times?” Sasha asks.

“Six.”

“Sasha,” Tim says skeptically, almost warning. “This has to be some sort of joke, right?” He faces Jon. “Is this payback for the thing with the gummy worms? Because I told Sasha that it might be a bit insensitive.”

“That was your idea,” Sasha splutters.

“This is not payback,” Jon insists. “I’m serious.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye out,” Martin shrugs.

“Right, then I’ll let you know if I see any worms becoming a little too interested in Sasha’s spreadsheets.” Tim winks.

“Wait—”

But Tim and Sasha are already headed back to their computer screens, as if 29th July is just a typical Friday.

Martin turns in the doorway, giving Jon a sympathetic glance, and his eyes catch on the demolished tape recorder, impulsively smashed into shards of plastic, metal poking out. He shoots Jon one last look of concern before walking away.

And Jon’s head erupts, the pain magma-hot.

The bite of worms still sings beneath his flesh, but Jon wakes to the kettle’s whine, determined to try again.

As the three of them file into his office, Jon tries to gather his thoughts. Okay. Take seven.

His eyes slide across the faces of his assistants—Sasha’s undiluted attention, Tim’s folded arms, Martin’s sunken shoulders.

Jon takes a breath and a half to strategise. The conflict here emerges from the fact that his colleagues do not have access to the context necessary to understand the long-term consequences of Prentiss’ attack. Jon isn’t certain that there’s a delicate way to go about this, to spill the Institute’s darkest secrets from the mouth of a man who, during his first year as Head Archivist, had stubbornly shut his eyes and stumbled blindly across danger, frightened of what he might see if he were to look in the right places.

But what other option does he have?

Jon braces himself as thunder rumbles at the base of his skull. “Thank you all for joining me,” he says stiffly.

Tim cocks his head defensively. “Is this like a performance review thing?”

“No, it’s not.” Jon lays his hands flat on the desk, buying himself time to think. One fingertip crests Sasha’s staple.

“I know who killed Gertrude Robinson.”

“What?” Martin squawks.

“It was Elias.”

“I know Elias is a prick but I don’t think he’s a murderous prick,” Tim chimes in.

“Why would he do that?” Sasha asks.

“She knew the truth about Jonah Magnus,” Jon says, voice lowered to a whisper. “There’s a tape she recorded, trying to warn us about the Institute, about Elias.”

“What tape?” Tim scans the room, his gaze drifting to the remains of the newly-destroyed tape recorder in Jon’s rubbish bin.

“I’ll explain everything. Just…try to keep an open mind, alright?” Jon says, choosing his words cautiously.

Sasha nods, encouraging.

Jon curls his fingers against the desk, trying to recall Gerry’s words from what feels like a lifetime ago. “There are these…forces just outside our universe, ancient powers, really. We can’t see them, not exactly, but they—they feed on our fear, they are our fear. All these statements, the real ones at least, come from people who have witnessed the Fears bleeding into our world—Andre Ramao, Nathan Watts, Jane Prentiss.”

“The real ones?” Martin frowns, evidently thrown off by the sudden reversal of Jon’s skepticism.

“There’s a reason why every couple of statements, there’s one that won’t record to my laptop,” Jon elaborates.

“What does this have to do with Elias?” Tim asks, jaw clenched.

“There are people, hungry for power, that serve the Fears. Elias, he works for the Eye but there are others: the Web, the Spiral, the Stranger—”

“What’s that one?” Tim interrupts. “The Stranger.”

Jon sighs, his veins beginning to buzz with irritation. “That’s not important right now. Listen, Elias wants to bring the Eye into our world. He’s already attempted the Watcher’s Crown once, but the lines between the Fears are blurred. He knows that to bring one, he must bring them all, and we can’t let him complete the ritual.”

Sasha has removed the pencil that was tucked behind her ear, now twirling it between her fingers. “How does it work?”

“I have to be—er, marked by all the fears,” Jon explains. “That’s why I’m telling you all of this. Prentiss is going to attack today, and if we don’t leave now, Elias will be one mark closer to achieving his goal.”

“What is his goal?” Tim demands. “Some sort of apocalypse?”

“Well, yeah,” Jon mumbles.

“I don’t understand,” Martin is saying. “Why you?”

Jon pushes himself out of his chair, desperation building. “Please, just stop asking questions and get out of here while you still can.”

“But I thought she was coming for you, not the rest of us,” Sasha interjects, her pencil still spinning.

Jon feels restless energy climbing up his calves and he begins to pace, back and forth behind his desk. “I’m trying to save you,” he says through gritted teeth. “I’m trying—”

He sighs, fists clenching. “Sasha, you’re going to die today and none of us will even notice. There will be a thing that steals your name and your desk and no one will know the difference. No one will know.”

Reaching one end of the room, Jon retraces his steps. “Tim, you’ll walk out of today with holes burrowed into your face, and this anger burning through you. You’ll burn right with it.”

Jon pauses, trying and failing to not feel vindicated by their horrified expressions. “And Martin,” he says softly, unable to bring himself to finish laying out Martin’s sentence.

Jon clears his throat. “So, please,” he begs. “Run.”

From Jon’s right comes the thud of the shelf collapsing, the splintering of the pierced wall.

As always, he is too late.

The whistle of the kettle has almost become a constant ringing in Jon’s ears.

Jon casts his eyes out across his archival staff. All still breathing, all still blissfully oblivious to how absolutely fucked they are, even now.

“Thank you all for joining me,” he says briskly.

Tim unfolds his arms. “This isn’t some kind of performance review, right?”

Jon opens his mouth to answer. Closes it.

Maybe showing his entire hand isn’t the best play. Maybe the big picture is too big. In the end, it doesn’t matter how, but Jon needs them out of here. Jon needs Sasha far away from Artefact Storage, and Tim far away from the worms, and Martin far away from that dead end in the tunnels where a corpse sits perched on a wooden chair. 

An Idea occurs to Jon. “Actually, it is.”

The colour leaches out of Martin’s cheeks.

“I have regrettably found your work inadequate, and in my position as Head Archivist, it is technically in my power to fire you.” Jon says, straining for a stern tone.

“So I am. And you are,” he adds. “Fired.”

The office goes cold with the silent stillness of shock.

It’s Tim who speaks first: “Oh, bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“You can’t be serious,” Tim argues, the words petering out into a stupefied chuckle.

“I have already requested for Elias to assign me a new archival staff,” Jon continues firmly. “You may collect your things and head home.”

“Jon,” Sasha says, disbelieving. “What’s this about?”

“No.” Tim raises his hand, calling for a time out. “Give me a proper excuse. You can’t just fire us.”

“I can,” Jon retorts. “I just did.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Sasha protests. If there’s anything that can tug at her temper, it’s incomprehensibility. Never in a million loops, not among a billion universes, would there be a logical reason to fire Sasha James. “It’s not our fault we were handed an Archive in disarray.”

This is not your fault.

These were the five words that Martin had whispered into Jon’s hair those nights in the safehouse when Jon couldn’t turn away from the shattered windows, watching the sky because it was watching him back.

Martin’s chin tucked atop his head, Martin’s arms encircling his shoulders.

This is not your fault.

These were the five words that Jon had nestled close against, finding comfort in their ignorance, but ultimately knowing they were wrong. He had still been getting used to knowing in that deep, jagged way—like glass shards slicing into soft underbelly.

“ Thank you, Sasha,” Tim says. “Look, if this is about the gummy worms thing, I apologise, but think of all the times I had to pay for drinks with some filing clerk just so you could track down someone who didn’t want to be found. I mean, do you know how boring clerks are on average?”

Jon can tell that Tim’s trying to keep things light, but Jon knows now that the Institute is his best bet of avenging his brother. And Tim is not going anywhere, not after Leanne Denikin’s mentions of the Circus, and not before the worm scars and Jon’s paranoia are there to drive him away.

Jon spares a wary glance at that damned shelf. “This isn’t up for discussion—”

“And you can’t just fire Sasha,” Tim rambles on. “Every interview, every transcript, every secure document she’s put on your desk has been flawless.”

Sasha smiles shyly, pleased with the flattery.

“And Martin,” Tim says, faltering. “Well, Martin’s trying his best.”

Martin shoots Tim an offended look, eyebrows drawn.

“But it’s not like you’ve made it easy on him,” Tim points out. “Not to mention that he was literally evicted from his flat by worms.”

“Only after being trapped in there for two weeks,” Martin reminds them.

Despite himself, Jon feels just the slightest bit betrayed that Martin’s taking Tim’s side.

“We’ve risked our lives for this job,” Sasha says. Her palm skims over her shoulder, just below the place where Michael’s sharpened digits had gouged out the worm.

“I know,” Jon says. “And I’m asking you to stop.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Tim asks sharply.

“Nothing.” Jon squeezes his eyes shut against the red-hot prodding of his headache. “Just go home. Please.”

Martin coughs awkwardly. “That’s not really an option for all of us.”

Right. Guilt prickles in Jon’s throat at the thought of Martin’s cot in the document storage room with its rumpled bed sheets and lumpy pillows. Jon swallows. “Just till the end of day,” he amends. “I’m sure there’s a cafe or—or a library that you can—”

“Christ, Jon,” Sasha scolds.

Martin bites his lip, electing to stay silent.

The guilt grows thorns, scraping at the strict lacquer on Jon’s prepared words.

Tim is shaking his head, still deeply perplexed. “What’s actually going on?”

“I already told you—”

“You couldn’t have found replacements that quickly,” Sasha reasons.

“Yeah, there’s not exactly a demand to be transferred down here,” Tim mutters.

Jon sighs raggedly. “I think that’s for the best.”

“You haven’t told them about the worms, have you?” Martin asks evenly.

Jon feels the weight of Sasha and Tim’s apprehensive stares as they come to rest on him.

“Unidentified parasites, Martin,” Jon corrects, no real bite to his words. “And no. Not yet.”

Martin lowers his head. Jon isn’t certain but he thinks that Martin almost looks disappointed.

This is when the shelf caves in. Jon feels the crash within his bones.

Somewhere, a kettle whistles.

Jon squints into the gathering dark of his office, pinching the paper clip between his thumb and forefinger. He propels the paper clip into some far corner of the room, leaving it for the shadows to lick at.

Jon doesn’t really have time for a list. He makes one anyway.

Item One: Unloading more than two years of fear-god lore and shared trauma all at once is not conducive to a warning that will actually be heeded by one’s employees. (Item 1A: They’re more likely to just sort of stand there, gaping at him like beached fish, choking on air. Item 1B: Ominous monologuing is not a skill that translates easily from Jon’s past career as a servant of the Eye.)

Item Two: It is not advisable to fire one’s entire staff without explanation. (Item 2A: There will be raised voices.)

Item Three: That shelf, that goddamn shelf is going to crumble every time, regardless of any mercy or self-restraint shown by Jon.

So, the truth doesn’t work. Lies don’t work. Jon drums his fingers atop the desk. What the hell does work?

A plan begins to form, rafters and bare bones first. It’s not a very good plan, Jon admits, but it’s something.

At precisely half ten, Jon smacks down a folded newspaper, neatly creased, on Tim’s desk. It lands with a satisfying thwack.

Tim quite literally drops what he’s doing, accidentally streaking highlighter across the bottom of a missing persons report, to get a closer look at the finely printed columns of text. His eyes leap around the adverts section that Jon has opened the paper to, before finally settling on a cramped announcement hastily circled in red pen.

Sasha sits up at her desk curiously, giving her fingers a momentary respite from a relentless typing speed that Jon can only describe as pulverising.

“Rare antiques auction,” Tim reads aloud for the benefit of both Sasha and Martin—Martin who is currently bent over his desk, lining up his stacks of sticky notes in an orderly row. His tongue pokes out from between his lips almost imperceptibly, in that adorable way that Jon has come to recognise as intense focus.

Jon is not staring. Maybe just a bit.

Tim glances up at Jon. “Is this like a new hobby or…”

Sasha leans over and plucks the newspaper from Tim’s hands. She scans the advert, hesitating. Jon knows how Sasha hates Artefact Storage, knows that she’s probably seen enough dusty store rooms and handle with care labels for a lifetime.

“Didn’t know you were into that sort of thing,” she comments. And then tossing a meaningful look over her shoulder at Martin, she adds, “Maybe Martin can take you thrifting sometime. He has an eye for hidden gems, don’t you, Martin?”

“Hm?” Martin snaps to attention with a startled, strangled noise. “Oh, uh. Not—not really.” 

“Not a hobby,” Jon says, hands crammed into his pockets so there’s no room for his nails to dig into his palms. “This is our next lead on Mikaele Salesa.”

“Salesa?” Martin echoes.

“He doesn’t seem like the sort to advertise in the paper,” Sasha points out, chin resting on one propped hand. “I don’t think most of his wares are strictly legal.”

“I would hope not,” Martin remarks, eyes wide. “I mean, he sells vases that swallow up husbands.”

Tim blows a breath out from puffed cheeks. “I guess it’s a good thing none of us are married, huh?”

Jon shifts his weight from foot to foot, resisting the urge to start pacing between Tim and Sasha’s desks. That clock above the filing cabinet must be wrong. Jon has time. He’s going to get them out, all of them out, alive and breathing and whole for once.

“Weren’t you going to record that statement today?” Sasha remembers.

Jon pictures the tape recorder as he left it: nestled between crumpled papers in his rubbish bin.

“It can wait,” he answers flatly.

“What’s Salesa got to do with this?” Tim wonders.

Jon is wilting under the constant interrogation. Loop after loop. Question after question, all to do it over again.

“I saw a few mentions of Salesa on some online message boards,” he explains. “From what I can tell, he’s supplying most of the items for this auction.”

Jon’s plan isn’t really an ingenious one. It’s just that neither the truth, nor lies, served to be a compelling reason for his assistants to evacuate the Archive. So, Jon reasons that a messy combination of the two might do the trick.

The parts about the auction are true. Message boards reserved for antiques experts really do exist, but they’re about as boring as one would expect. No whispers of Salesa’s whereabouts or the origins of his vases.

“Specifically, there’s a highly sought after complete mid-seventeenth century Dutch tea set that will be bid on,” Jon says, worried that there is such a thing as too much detail in improvisation.

“Does it…do anything?” Martin asks slowly.

Jon sets his mouth into a firm line. “That’s what I hope we’ll be able to find out.”

“We?” Tim perks up. “As in a field trip?”

Jon nods. 

Sasha traces a finger along her keyboard, her nail skipping across the row from Q to P. “Shouldn’t someone stay behind?” she says thoughtfully. “Elias is always mumbling about quotas and workplace productivity. There might be concerns if we just leave the place deserted.”

“Actually, Elias already approved for us to go,” Jon lies. 

Sasha raises her eyebrows, shrugs. “Weird,” she says and, to Jon’s delight, leaves it at that.

“Although I’m not sure if we can get away with borrowing one of the Research department’s vans,” Jon says. “They’re quite possessive.”

Tim grins triumphantly. “I think I can arrange something. Fatima owes me a favour and I’m pretty sure she knows where they keep the keys.”

Jon can’t help but grin along with him. They’ll spend a nice, boring day traipsing through nice, boring showrooms and warehouses, looking at nice, boring vanities and claw-foot bathtubs and monogrammed gloves and chipped chandeliers and sepia-tinged photographs of people long gone, all of whom died from nothing more sinister than old age.

Jon feels that glimmer of hope spark anew.

This is finally, finally working.

Tim claims the driver’s seat, and Sasha and Martin graciously take the back seat, which means that Jon finds himself riding shotgun. 

It’s an uncharacteristically sunny day, maybe one of the warmest they’ll get this summer. Blinding light reflects off of the windshield. A wry smile almost cracks across Jon’s lips. This hadn’t been what he’d meant when he’d wished for endless summers as a child.

Jon squeezes his eyes shut for just a moment, letting himself imagine the tingle of cool basement air across his skin, insulated among rows and rows of entirely innocuous heirlooms.

The stale air of the van bakes his skin. Jon hears the soft click of seatbelts, watches Tim’s hand tug at the rearview mirror.

“Could you turn on the air con?” Sasha leans forward, one elbow braced against the back of Jon’s seat.

The van lurches slightly as Tim puts it in reverse.

“Yeah,” Jon says, reaching for the dial that controls the car’s air circulation.

Nothing happens.

Jon tries once more, rotating the dial back clockwise, and then counterclockwise again. “I don’t think it’s working,” he observes.

“It’s stuck?” Sasha asks.

“No, it’s—nothing seems to be happening when I turn it,” Jon describes.

“That’s odd.”

Tim has nearly backed out of their spot completely, but pauses to give the dashboard a firm thump. “Try it now.”

Jon fiddles with the controls, mumbling, “I don’t think that’s going to—”

A cold blast to the face interrupts him, and he sits back, bewildered. “Never mind.”

Tim wrinkles his nose, his expression turning sour. “God, do you smell that?”

Martin coughs and Jon twists in his seat to catch tears welling in his eyes, overwhelmed by the familiar scent wafting through the van.

Sasha sniffs, instantly regretting it as she buries her nose in her sleeve. “It’s like really awful compost,” she says, holding back a gag.

It’s decay, Jon recognises. Decay and rot and humus tilled by things that burrow deep.

They won’t be getting in through the air con.

Maybe not through the Archives ventilation system, but as for this one—

Jon almost doesn’t notice the first worm that bursts from the vent, almost misses how it contorts as it maneuvers its fat, silver body through the slanted slits.

The next worm is close behind, clinging to the curve of the dashboard as it wriggles out. They clog the vent, so densely packed that Jon can no longer feel the flow of air against his face. The pressure builds as they surge forward, jammed up against the vent’s grates. Jon, hardly able to breathe, much less scream, fumbles for the door handle.

The van descends a steep slope, on its way out of the parking garage.

“Stop the van,” Jon chokes out.

Tim must catch sight of the worm inching its way toward the steering wheel because he slams on the brakes. “Shit,” he hisses.

“What’s wrong?” comes Martin’s panicked call from the back seat.

The dam bursts, flinging the worms at the front of the pack through the vent.

One lands just below Jon’s throat, crawling up the crest of his collarbone as if it’s some great summit to be conquered.

Tim swears in the seat beside him as Sasha and Martin clamour to strip their seatbelts off.

Jon buries himself against the headrest, defeated and guilty, some small part of him knowing that they never even would have made it out of the garage.

Somewhere, a kettle whistles. Skin dented in the shape of a metal spiral. Jon thinks he’s got the point by now, thank you very much.

Not that there is a point to all this.

Jon sighs, scattering the dark splotches from his vision. So much for plans and lists. He might as well just make things up as he goes. Eventually, something’s bound to work. Right?

“Right?” Jon asks the paper clip that has fallen to his desk.

It does not give him an answer.

“Didn’t Tim already find a copy of the marriage license?” Martin stands, hands clasped as he watches Jon sip at his tea.

“Yes, and to be thorough I still want to send someone down to the town hall where Mr. Ramao and his husband were married,” Jon says rigidly. 

Martin nods. “But that’s almost an hour commute each way. I might not be back until the afternoon,” he says carefully. 

Jon sets his cup down with a clatter that rings throughout the office. “Is that a problem?”

“No, of course not, I—” Martin pauses. “Well, I thought you wanted that report from me by the end of today.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jon says. “I’ve changed my mind.”

Martin nods again, head bobbing. “Okay, I’ll have it done tomorrow morning.”

Jon’s not sure there will be a tomorrow.

“And don’t feel like you have to rush back,” Jon reassures him. “I want to be certain that we’re not missing anything important.”

Don’t rush back or else you’ll end up putting that corkscrew to use.

Martin hesitates in the doorway. “Right,” he says.

Jon sends Tim out an errand to drop in on one of his filing clerks, asking after some confidential documents for a handful of their more mundane statements, several of them cases that Jon has already surreptitiously added to the “discredited” section.

Sasha doesn’t wander into Jon’s office until nearly half an hour later. The door is cracked halfway open but she knocks anyway.

“It’s not even noon and the Archives are abandoned. I thought for a second there that you’d all just gone on some secret mission and left me behind,” she jokes, a soft smile curling her lips.

Jon shakes his head. “Martin’s doing a last minute follow up on the Ramao case, and Tim’s flirting with some hospital filing clerk.”

“I’m glad he’s off bothering someone else for once,” Sasha says. Her words are harsh but her tone is unmistakably affectionate.

She taps her fingers against Jon’s desk. “Anything big planned for me today?”

“Actually there’s this lecture at eleven at the museum. It’s on detritivores,” Jon says. “Those are—”

“Decomposers, yeah,” she finishes for him. “Worms, I’m assuming.”

“Precisely.”

“You know, we could just search this stuff up online,” Sasha suggests. “I’m sure the internet has loads to say about dealing with worms.”

Jon gives her a cynical look. “I doubt that WikiHow will be particularly useful in our circumstances.”

Sasha gapes at him. “You know what WikiHow is?”  she asks, audibly thrilled.

“Of course I know what WikiHow is,” Jon hisses. “How old do you think I am?”

Sasha shrugs, grinning devilishly. “You tell me. You’re the one who tried to convince us that you were turning thirty-eight last year.”

“Yes, alright,” Jon surrenders.

Sasha’s laughter devolves into a series of snorts as she stumbles out of the office, but this version of Jon doesn’t really mind that it’s at his expense.

Just as noon is creeping up on a deserted Archive, Jon almost feels as if he ought to pat himself on the back—if not for sophistication of planning, then for pure dumb luck.

The only problem is that Jon doesn’t have the best track record with luck.

Halfway down the hallway, his office already locked up, Jon hears the lift ding, sounding out a funereal toll. He freezes, trying to remember if Jane Prentiss is human enough to work a lift. This is when the doors spring open, revealing Tim and Sasha.

Jon’s jaw drops, horrified, and he can do nothing but stare. “What—what are you doing here?” he splutters.

Sasha shrugs, a sloppy, careless movement of her shoulders. “The lecture was canceled. They didn’t say why.”

Jon whirls on Tim, frantic. “And your filing clerk?”

Tim shares a confused look with Sasha. “Out sick.”

“Damn it,” Jon mutters.

“I can always go back another time,” Tim offers.

“Yeah,” Sasha agrees, placing a comforting hand against Jon’s back. “I’m sure there will be plenty more worm lectures to choose from. Maybe they’ll even reschedule this one.”

Jon steps away from her touch, her soothing tone sending his stomach roiling, fear and anger bubbling as one beneath his skin. They’re all so casual about this. Jon can feel his breaths coming quickly now.

“No, you don’t understand,” he says, teeth clenched. “You can’t be here.”

A silent exchange plays out between Tim and Sasha, ending in a resigned shrug from Tim.

“What do you mean?” Sasha asks slowly.

“I—”

Jon is turned away from the lift when it dings again, spilling out a third voice: “What’s going on?”

Martin glances between Sasha and Tim, trying to figure out why they’re all frozen there in the hallway together, watching a Head Archivist who is quite obviously seconds away from hyperventilating.

Jon clears his throat, tries to knit together his frayed nerves. “Martin,” he says, voice brittle. “You’re back early.”

Martin’s mouth quirks apologetically. “Yeah, sorry. I know you said to be thorough, but when I got there, they kept insisting that Andre Ramao had never been married there. They even tried telling me that his husband David never even existed, and I didn’t want to sit there arguing all day—”

“Right,” Jon interrupts. “You made the logical decision. Of course.”

Martin drifts closer, his worried gaze lowered to Jon’s face. “Is—is everything alright? I could go back and ask again if you think it’ll help.”

The crash of the shelf, muffled by distance. The squirming of worms diving out from beneath the door to his office. Tim and Sasha turn in the direction of the noise, caught off guard.

“No,” Jon says. “I think it’s a bit too late for that.”

Chapter Text

The thing is, Jon’s diversions seem like they’re going to work, until they don’t.

He sends Martin out for blank tapes, insisting that the knee-deep stockpile that he’s hidden in a corner of his office is to be reserved for emergencies only, and really, what kind of Head Archivist would he be if he didn’t have a backup stash for his backup stash?

He directs Tim to the nearest pet store with a list of questions about worms and their dietary habits, life cycles, social behaviour, and habitat preferences.

He insists that Sasha track down sellers on the shadier side of the antiques business, tracing her fingers across dust-coated artefacts.

He drags them through muddy parks to dig for soil samples. He deposits them on doorsteps, ringing doorbells and chasing ghost stories.  

And Jon does it all again, shuffling tasks with shaky fingers, hoping this new deck will finally deal him some cards that don’t spell out gruesome deaths for his friends. He plays dice with time, rolling snake eyes over and over and over.

But it falls apart every single damn time.

There’s always something—always some cruel twist of fate, easily brushed off as coincidence. Sometimes it’s keys forgotten in a desk drawer, or a phone mysteriously drained of battery. Sometimes it’s freak weather events or last-minute cancellations.

To be honest, many of Jon’s failures result from human error. (Insofar as Jon is to be considered human.)

“Coffee?” Sasha repeats flatly.

“Yes, well,” Jon says, grasping for an explanation. “It’s been a slow morning.”

“I heard Martin making tea right when I came in,” Sasha points out. “He didn’t bring you any?”

Jon hears the suspicion waver in her voice. To be fair, not bringing Jon his morning tea is a distinctly un-Martin-like thing to do.

Jon shrugs, shoulders stiff. “I suppose not.”

“And—and it’s not just for me. After all the orders we’ve put in for CO2 canisters, I think it might be wise to get on Rosie’s good side,” he adds quickly. “Might be wiser to get on as many good sides as we can now that everyone upstairs blames us for the worm situation.”

“Right,” Sasha says briskly. “But I’m kind of in the middle of tracking this licence plate, and you know I’m still working on setting up that digital database we were talking about.”

“Of course.” Jon nods. “But this shouldn’t take too long.”

“Are you sure? I know a few interns from Research who wouldn’t mind doing us a favour.”

“I think it’s probably best that the peace offering comes directly from one of us.”

Sasha presses her lips into a thin line. “Is there any particular reason why you’ve asked me to fetch your coffee?”

Jon blinks, taken aback by the sudden bite to her tone, thinly veiled beneath politeness.

Tim’s words drift back to him, carried on the whistling wind that would beat against the walls of the cabin on those nights when Jon crouched by the tape recorder, replaying conversations between phantoms: It’s some sexist bullshit, is what it is.

Sasha stares at him expectantly, waiting for an answer.

Hot shame burns across Jon’s face. He didn’t mean it like that but—well, it hardly matters, does it? Sasha thinks he meant it like that, and regardless of intent, it sounded like he meant it like that. It certainly explains the guarded, chin-tilted look she’s giving him.

Christ, how can he fix this? How does he explain that he’d intended this particular errand not as a misogynistic-be-a-dear thing, but more of a life-saving-you’ll-thank-me-later sort of thing?

Should he tell her that she’s by far the most qualified, competent person to step foot in this Archive in years, possibly in decades? Should he tell her that she’s a genius and that she doesn’t deserve to die? Should he tell her how he never really earned the title of Head Archivist, but was chosen, groomed, and it should have been her—would have been her if the game hadn’t been rigged from the start?

“No, I—erm, don’t want you to go alone,” Jon blurts.

Sasha raises an eyebrow. “No?”

“I was going to ask you to bring Tim along,” Jon says, perhaps not very convincingly. “It’s going to be a lot of coffee. Maybe a few pastries. So, you—you might need an extra set of arms.”

Sasha nods slowly.

Jon clears his throat. “Sasha, I highly value all the work that you’ve done in the Archives. You are a model employee, and I should tell you that more often.”

Sasha grins hesitantly. “You should.”

Jon takes a breath before resuming. “Really, I greatly appreciate your work ethic and—”

She waves her hand to shut him up. “How do you take your coffee?”

“Black,” Jon answers, still flushed with the embarrassment of making an arse of himself.

“And how about Rosie?”

Jon falters, unsure.

“I’ll ask Martin,” Sasha says, a teasing smile painted across her cheeks.

“Yeah,” Jon sighs, watching as Sasha slips out of his office. Really, he’s just relieved that not every mistake he makes causes irreparable damage. Although, he supposes, there’s always the next loop to look forward to if everything goes to shit.

Lucky him.

It’s not until Jon hears the low rumble of Tim’s voice and Sasha’s light, breathless giggles pass by outside his door, two-thirds of his staff on their way out of the Archives, does he realise that he’s forgotten to assign Martin his own distraction for the day.

Jon presses his fingertips to his throbbing temples, forcing out an idea whose execution will hopefully not end with a lot of screaming and worm-shaped wounds and blood. (There’s always more blood than Jon expects.) The urge to run is strong, to catch a train that will take him and Martin to some other safehouse that is actually safe this time. Or perhaps Jon should commandeer one of the Institute’s vans and just drive as far as he can before the worms burst through the vents.

Jon’s tried running from his problems though, and where did that leave him? A suspected murderer camping out in his ex-girlfriend’s flat, and then, oh right, kidnapped a couple times. More than a couple times.

Not quite sure how he got there, Jon stands before Martin’s desk, hands clasped primly. Martin is bent over his keyboard, eyes boring holes through his computer screen. His fingers hover above the top row of keys, hesitating before making a detour to the space bar, and finally drifting toward the backspace key. Martin jabs at the key repeatedly, and Jon is able to pinpoint the exact moment when he resigns himself to scrapping the sentence entirely, holding down the backspace key. In the reflection in Martin’s glasses, Jon watches as the blank screen grows blanker, cursor leaping backwards as the void eats up Martin’s mistakes.

Martin starts again.

Again, Jon thinks. Because it is a word he has whispered to himself many times on the tail end of the kettle’s whistle. It is sometimes a promise. It is often a curse.

Jon clears his throat. “Martin,” he says hoarsely. “You’re not busy, are you?”

Martin glances up at him, startled. “I’ve been trying to finish this report that you wanted by—” He pauses, giving Jon a puzzled look. “I suppose it can wait if there’s something else you need me for?”

Jon nods. “It has become increasingly clear that as researchers we can’t be so easily removed from the subjects of our study. Take your encounter with Jane Prentiss, for example, or Sasha’s meeting with Michael.”

“Right,” Martin says cautiously, his brow pinched.

“I think that entering the field ourselves might give us an advantage in predicting and preparing for future encounters,” Jon pitches. “So long as we observe from a safe distance.”

There’s not really any such thing as a safe distance in their line of work, but Jon doesn’t say this.

“You mean,” Martin says, head cocked as he tries to wrap his mind around Jon’s admittedly cryptic explanation. (Jon is very good at being cryptic.) “You want us to go undercover or something?”

“A stake out,” Jon clarifies. “If you’re up for it, I would greatly appreciate your help.”

Martin’s eyes stray to the blank document pulled up on his computer screen. “You’re sure you don’t want to wait until Tim and Sasha come back?” he asks self-consciously.

“Actually, it’s very important that we leave immediately,” Jon says.

“Oh,” Martin says, pushing back his chair. “Is it far?”

Jon shrugs, choosing not to confess that he actually hadn’t thought as far ahead as to where said stake out would actually be occurring.

“Not too far,” he says.

Fortunately, Jon discovers that the words “Tim asked me to ask you” have a very high chance of producing favourable results when followed by a request to borrow one of the Institute’s vehicles. Charged with restless energy, and spinning Fatima-from-Research’s key chain around his index finger, Jon leads Martin out to the garage.

As Jon backs out of the van’s parking spot, his eyes flick down to the air vents and then momentarily toward Martin in the passenger’s seat. His face is flushed from the July heat trapped within the car, red painting over the freckles that dot his nose.  Jon’s hands slide against the steering wheel, clammy and slippery, but he can’t turn on the air con. That is one mistake he will not be repeating.

No, if the worms want out, they’ll have to do it themselves, without the draught to stir their senses.

“The air’s broken?” Martin asks as Jon guides the car down the ramp toward the garage’s exit.

“What?” Jon asks, his mouth a hard, determined line. He steals another glance at Martin to find sweat beading on his forehead. “Oh, yeah, yeah it is.”

Martin collapses back against his seat wearily. Jon frowns and reaches for the button that will lower the passenger side window. If the worms don’t get them, heat stroke might finish the job. After all, Jon has grown accustomed to the basement chill of the Archives, and Martin’s wool jumpers are pretty much a year-round staple of his wardrobe, even on what certainly must be the warmest day of the year.

Jon thinks of their wardrobe in the safehouse: his shirts mixed in with Martin’s jumpers, sleeves and sleeves and sleeves dangling in the cool dark, so when Jon rolled out of bed, groggy from a night of horrid nightmares and unblinking eyes, the piece of clothing that his hand landed on didn’t always belong to him. Jon rarely cared enough to select a different hanger from the wardrobe.

Which street is this again?

With wind ruffling his hair, Martin looks significantly less ill. He perches his wrist beside the open window, spreading his fingers so that the rush of air can weave between them. Jon has always been very good at keeping his eyes on the road, but now he can’t help but watch the red seep from Martin’s cheeks.

Smiling faintly to himself, Jon recalls Martin’s soft grumbles during their interminable trek through that domain of the Vast.

“What was that, Martin?”

Martin groaned, stuffing his hands in his pockets frustratedly. “I said that I get the whole the-journey-will-be-the-journey-thing, but I wish that the journey would involve less sore feet and more fun road tripping.” He gave Jon a pointed, petulant look. “You still won’t tell me how much longer we’ll be in this domain.”

“That’s because I don’t know,” Jon reminded him. “Time doesn’t exactly work the same here.”

“Right, right.”

Martin sighed. “God, I’d kill for a seat on a nice, comfortable couch right now.”

“Maybe you should take over this whole smiting thing for me,” Jon joked.

Martin fixed him with a look. “Jon.”

“Sorry,” Jon exhaled, a deep exhaustion setting in that he knew had been nestled there long before his toes had begun to throb, long before they’d even left the safehouse. “I know.”

Jon doesn’t think this is what Martin meant by “fun road tripping”, but at this rate, it’s the closest they’ll get. Just the two of them, escaped from the Archives, even if only for a few hours. It isn’t a date, Jon knows. It isn’t like that yet with this Martin—this Martin who has his face upturned for the wind that traces the contour of the side of the van to tear at it—but Jon feels lighter somehow.

In Scotland, they stayed in mostly. And after—well, there’s only so much you can do to keep romance alive during the apocalypse. What with reciting the suffering of innocents for the Eye’s sick pleasure and trying not to peer too closely at the blood on his hands, Jon didn’t have many options for arranging a couple’s getaway.

Besides, there’s nothing particularly fun about this road trip. The next thirty minutes of the drive are spent entirely in silence. Jon wasn’t planning on winding up at a specific location, but he drives and drives, almost as if in a trance, only breaking out of his stupor at the sound of Martin’s voice much later:

“Is this—is this Hill Top Road?”

Jon’s foot falls leaden against the brake and the van shudders to a halt.

Sure enough, there on the opposite side of the street stands a rather unassuming, standard two-storey house. 105 Hill Top Road.

Jon’s fingers fasten like shackles around the steering wheel. No. He didn’t mean to come here. He can’t be here. Not when he still sees Martin strung up in Annabelle Cane’s webs behind his eyelids every time that he blinks.

“I—” Jon stammers, the words drying up on his tongue.

“This is the house from Ivo Lensik’s statement right?” Martin asks, leaning his head out of the window as he scrutinizes the place. “God, that feels like ages ago. Has something new cropped up?”

Jon leaves Martin’s question unanswered for a few seconds as he directs all of his will power toward prying his stubborn fingers from the steering wheel. “Actually I found another statement a couple months ago from Father Edwin Burroughs, a priest who tried to perform an exorcism on the house.”

Martin narrows his eyes in concentration. “I don’t remember that one.”

“You were—” Jon coughs. “That was when Prentiss—”

“Oh,” Martin says. “Yeah.”

“Anyway,” Jon continues, stilted. “Father Burroughs mentioned feeling as if his skin was burning while in the house, the same as Ivo Lensik, and it got me thinking about Jason North’s statement about the clearing in Loch Glass.”

“I thought we were finished with the follow up to Mr. North’s statement.”

Jon inclines his head. “We are. Mostly. The frequent mentions of 105 Hill Top Road still concern me and I want to be certain that it no longer presents any danger to the neighborhood.”

“What sort of danger?” Martin asks, going still. 

This house is also the site of a tear in reality that will no doubt cause us all sorts of trouble. But Jon does not say this.

“It’s just a precautionary measure,” Jon assures him.

Martin pulls back from the window as a lorry passes by in the other direction. “So, we’re looking for fire? Suspicious, shadowy figures?”

“Anything out of the ordinary.”

“ Ordinary is kind of subjective,” Martin points out.

Objectifying the subjective. It had been Jon’s personal motto back in Research. A stupid one, he sees now. No matter how many spreadsheets and histograms one makes, there will also be something inherently unscientific about fear. Sure, you can chalk it up to physiological response—the hypothalamus frozen between fight and flight, adrenaline pumping, hairs standing on end, heart pounding—but that deep bone-chill always drills further than physical sense. That’s the thing that no one understood at the Institute. You can determine the pitch of a scream, you can map out its waveform, but that won’t tell you how it feels as it forces its way up, scraping the throat and numbing that small part of the human mind that still thinks of itself as immortal, invincible, god-like, with vulnerability.

The field teams keep loads of gadgets in these vans, Jon remembers, designed specifically to record and observe paranormal occurrences and spill out pretty graphs that attempt to quantify the unquantifiable.

“I think we’ve got some equipment in the back,” he tells Martin.

They manage to get the boot open with some difficulty. Jon pushes aside a sheaf of plastic evidence bags, scattered over the rest of the supplies in a layer of transparent blue. Martin knocks half a dozen boxes of disposable rubber gloves out of the way as Jon begins to dig through the contents of the boot. To be quite honest, Jon doesn’t know what half of this technology is supposed to do. To his untrained eye, the blinking lights, twisted antennae, gleaming chrome, and buttons and switches of all shapes and sizes are just expensive-looking things that whir, beep, or flash to life every couple seconds.

His hand closes around something vaguely gun-shaped, and Jon unearths the object from beneath a package of spare batteries, trying not to grip its handle too tightly or make any sudden moves that might accidentally carve a bullet hole in his foot. That would be very embarrassing, even if the injury would be temporary.

Turns out, the object that Jon is cradling is not a weapon (as far as he can tell). Instead of the dark, oily black of a pistol, its exterior is bright yellow. Rather than a barrel, Jon finds himself staring down a screen lit pale green. His fingers slip, catching on one of the buttons, perhaps where the trigger ought to be, and a thin pinpoint of a red light streams from one end of the thing.

“Oh, that’s an infrared thermometer, right?” Martin says, surfacing from a pile of LED headlamps, fingers twined between adjustable straps. “I didn’t know we had the ones with a laser sight.”

“You’ve used one before?” Jon asks, halfway between relieved and ashamed of his incompetence.

Martin ducks his head, finally having extracted his fingers from the tangled mess of the headlamps. “I haven’t, but they used them on Ghost Hunt UK to measure sudden drops in temperature at this abandoned primary school they went to. If a place is haunted there’s supposed to be cold spots all over.” Martin frowns. “Actually it wasn’t that spooky of an episode. There was this bit where they took turns exploring the playground on their own, but I guess the slide was old and couldn’t handle all that weight, so it just sort of caved in at one point. I think they took it as a sign that the ghosts didn’t want them intruding.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Martin,” Jon says irritably. “Ghosts don’t exist.”

Not those kinds of ghosts anyway.

Jon scans the mound of equipment for a recognisable item, and his gaze lands on a small, boxy object, a lens set into one side. He reaches for it, and at his touch, a screen comes to life, painting Jon’s view of the back of the van in ceruleans and violets. Jon turns the camera on Martin and the screen lights up with warmer colours—reds and oranges lending themselves to fill in his face and neck.

A thermal camera , Jon realises, and the lie, hardly just a bud up until now, reveals its blossoms.

“We’re not ghost-hunting,” Jon says, nose upturned. “I want to check for abnormal temperature fluctuations and watch the area for anyone who seems to take an interest in 105 Hill Top Road.”

“Besides us, you mean?”

“Yes, besides us, Martin.”

The first twenty minutes after the official start of the stake out pass in peaceful silence. Jon is grateful for the quiet, grateful that, on top of the sweat soaking through his collar and the needles drilling through his frontal lobe, he doesn’t have to scramble for something not entirely idiotic to say.

With the thermal camera set up on the dashboard, Martin raising the infrared thermometer level with his open window, an entirely empty street, and no sign of smoke (or even webs for that matter), there isn’t much that needs saying.

Peeling his eyes from the shifting hues of the thermal camera’s screen, Jon takes a moment to look at Martin, just really look.

Their time in the Archives hadn’t marked Martin as it had Jon. There are no patches of skin to point at now, reminiscing about a before when they were not marred by scars or burns or cuts or scratches. Still, Jon sees the Archives’ early imprints, bright as freshly drawn blood—the dark circles beneath Martin’s eyes, the subtle sag of his shoulders, the smallness of him, really.

This is a Martin who still believes that agency is something given, not earned. A Martin who still has time for poetry, when inspiration strikes.

A Martin who is watching Jon, the look on his face a particular type of precarious, lips parted only slightly. It’s a look Jon knows well, the sort of look that means that Martin has something to say but won’t. He’ll just sit there, patient in a jittery way, words locked away tight until Jon turns to him and asks what is it, Martin?

The thermal camera flickers aquamarine and then back to deep blue.

Jon turns in his seat and asks, “What is it, Martin?”

Martin freezes, caught in his indecision. “Oh, it’s nothing really.”

(Because it’s always nothing the first time Jon asks.)

“Tell me anyway,” Jon presses.

“I—I don’t suppose you noticed any binoculars while we were back there?”

“I did not,” Jon says slowly, scrutiny turning toward the house’s curtained windows on the second floor. “Why, have you seen something?”

“No,” Martin says, pulling his arm through the window and back into his lap, hauling the infrared thermometer with it. “But that’s sort of the point.”

“The point?”

“It doesn’t really feel like a stake out without binoculars, or—or some sort of spyglass. It just feels like we happen to be sitting in a car, watching a house.” Martin pauses expectantly, as if this explanation is supposed to have clarified anything to Jon.

“We are sitting in a car, watching a house.”

“I know,” Martin says. His nose goes all scrunched as he thinks over a rephrasing. “I guess it all feels weirdly…” 

“Amateur?” Jon supplies.

“Yeah,” Martin agrees. “Yeah,” he repeats, a bit more defensive now. “How’s it that the Research department gets new spirit boxes and electromagnetic field meters and—and things with lasers every other quarter, but we have to practically beg for new ink cartridges for the printer?”

“Elias Bouchard’s budget decisions are entirely out of my control,” Jon promises, inclined to side with Martin’s sentiment. “Trust me, I’ve tried to talk to him about the shelves—”

“Oh God, the shelves, ” Martin groans sympathetically. “I nearly got crushed in document storage the other day, did I tell you? Barely made it out alive.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re still in one piece, Martin,” Jon says, perhaps a touch too sincere for the context. 

“Me too,” Martin says softly.

There are worse things, Jon knows, than this. There are things much, much worse than a few headaches, shards of smashed tape recorder stabbing his fingertips. Things much worse than close calls but Martin in one piece after all.

“You know,” Martin says, his voice now determined, lit up with the brilliant enthusiasm of an Idea. “We ought to make things right. A little bit of vigilantism never hurt anyone.”

“What do you suggest?” Jon asks, failing terribly at flattening out his growing smile, and not the slightest bit upset about it. “Steal their pens?”

Martin tilts his head, seriously considering. “Yeah, maybe. And whatever else they’ve got extra of that we’re missing.”

“Staples,” Jon proposes.

“Sticky notes.”

“That lavender soap that David is always bragging about,” Jon recalls.

“Oh,” Martin gasps. “The Good Microwave.”

“Functional security cameras.”

“Functional shelves.”

“Blissful ignorance,” Jon adds thoughtfully.

“Not sure that’s something we can steal.”

“No, I don’t think so either.” Jon lets his eyes linger on Martin’s face for a moment, achingly fond. “Martin Blackwood, Robin Hood of office supplies.” He says it with a hint of approval.

He says it because Martin deserves to feel like the hero, even if it’s in something as silly as this.

Martin beams, warm laughter spilling out. “How about sunglasses?”

“I don’t think Robin Hood wore sunglasses.”

“Not for that,” Martin corrects, gesturing at the windshield, the thermal camera, their view of Hill Top Road. “For the stake out. To conceal our identities. Shouldn’t we have sunglasses?”

“It never occurred to me,” Jon admits. “But it’s not as if there’s anyone around to recognise us.”

Martin surveys the deserted street, and nods, surrendering.

“Anyway, there’s no need for binoculars or sunglasses today,” Jon assures him. “We’ll be perfectly fine with the temperature readings alone.”

Martin wipes a hand across his forehead. It comes away damp. Jon’s own face tingles with sweat. God damn it is hot in this van.

It’s quiet here too, awkward because despite the banter, despite the light-hearted scheming, this Jon is still Martin’s boss, still strict and rigid, all serrated corners and stinging rebukes. The sort of man who might prick you and then scold you for bleeding all over him, sooner than admit that it hurts him too, being this sharp.

Martin reaches for the infrared thermometer, propping his elbow on the edge of his window as he lets the gadget dangle in the stagnant summer air.

Eyes returned to the road, Jon wishes that Martin would find something else to say to him. Jon wishes that Martin would laugh again, just for a little while. Just so Jon can press it once more into his straining memory, find it a home between the what-ifs and the used-tos, store it safely in a well-worn coat with patched elbows for Jon to wrap himself in later.

It’s late afternoon when they return to the Institute.

Jon’s first thought when he sees the neon yellow perimeter strung up around the entrance is, Perhaps, we shouldn’t have come back.

Jon’s second thought when he sees the glass doors blinking red and white in the strobe of ambulance lights is the same, but without the perhaps.

Not that there’s anywhere else he could have dropped Martin off. Certainly not at Jon’s flat. They’re not there yet, Jon suspects.

His third thought stutters when he sees the men in hazmat suits, hoisting carefully sealed containers of worm corpses into the back of a lorry.

Jon’s fourth thought isn’t really a complete thought; it’s just three words, easily squashed into the space of one syllable. Tim and Sasha.

“Oh God,” breathes Martin from the passenger seat. He is already grasping at the door handle.

Jon is not sure which makes him feel worse: the gnawing guilt or the sliver of space in his chest where it dissipates and there’s no room for anything more than feeling tired. Jon, selfishly, is tired, and the stiff back of his chair in the hospital waiting room is not making things any easier for him.

He assumes they stumbled in, steaming coffee cups in hand, only to be swallowed up in a crush of Prentiss and her ilk. He assumes it probably hurt something awful. Well, really, he doesn’t need to assume that part.

But the distant pity that settles over Jon is not opaque. A sort of yikes, but at least they won’t remember it in the morning pity. A temporary sympathy.

Maybe he should have known that coffee runs can be quick affairs with two sets of arms and at least one archival assistant who’d much rather be at her desk, back behind her computer. Maybe he should have given up on this whole diversion angle long ago.

Martin stirs gently, half-asleep on the chair beside Jon’s. Jon studies him, head slumped to the side, chin tucked against his collarbone.

And at least— 

Jon eradicates the thought before he can regret it. It is an unfair thought. It is, at least Martin is safe, at least I’m not one mark closer to the end of the world. This kind of cost-benefit analytic approach to the value of human life strikes Jon as something Gertrude would do, and Jon is not Gertrude Robinson.

Not in the ways that count, at least.

Jon shuts his eyes, trying to convince himself how simple it will be to scrub this day from his conscience when the loop resets. If it resets. Jon’s not sure if it will. After all, he’s never made it this far before.

How many chances is too many?

Just a few more, Jon thinks, although he doesn’t know whether this is a plea or a promise.

Somewhere, a kettle whistles.

Jon discovers a paper clip stamped into his cheek and, strangely enough, doesn’t feel his stomach drop with that familiar dread. The pounding in his skull has dulled. The shadows have retreated slightly. The change is barely noticeable, but it is there.

On the desk is a tape recorder, but Jon can’t find it in himself to care much.

He doesn’t know what it is about this loop. Maybe it’s that the blanket draped around his shoulders smells like Martin, his laugh lovingly bundled into its folds. Maybe it’s simply that last night in the waiting room was the first time Jon has let sleep drag him under in—in a while. Maybe it’s the fact that yesterday never really happened. Jon asked for another chance and the universe finally listened.

Someone knocks on his office door, setting a rhythm for the disordered hope unraveling in Jon’s head to follow.

“Come in,” Jon says.

Martin leans in through the doorway, soft and flushed in the way he is in the mornings. “Wasn’t sure if you were sleeping in here.”

Jon rolls his shoulders back, testing for lasting aches from the hospital chair. “I just woke up.”

“Good,” Martin says. “Oh—uh, I brought your tea.” He indicates the tray in his hands with a nod.

“Right, thank you.” Jon accepts the mug, turning it slowly in hands to seep in all the warmth it can offer. As the mug spins, that bloody acronym reveals itself, letter by letter.

“Thank God indeed,” Jon mutters.

“Sorry?”

Through the steam fogging up his glasses, Jon watches Martin blink at him curiously.

Jon taps a finger to the mug’s tacky slogan. “Friday,” he explains.

“Yeah,” Martin says, chuckling awkwardly. “Weekend around the corner.”

He looks a bit confused at the prospect of his boss, who is known for working outrageous amounts of overtime, being relieved for Saturday to arrive. Jon can’t exactly blame him for it. 

Martin turns to leave, tray tucked under his arm.

“And Martin?” Jon calls. “Don’t worry about finishing that report by the end of today. I’m a bit behind in recording statements so I won’t need it finished until next week.”

Martin nods, closing the door behind him.

Jon drains his cup (and smiles).

“Hey, boss,” Tim greets cheerfully, choosing to swing the door wide open instead of knocking. “I’m heading out for lunch, want to come with?”

Jon glances up, caught off guard, from a box of files marked “G.” (He thought this might have meant Gertrude, but is beginning to suspect that he was sorely mistaken.)

The offer is a variation on Tim’s usual introduction, and to its credit, completely unforeseen. Jon takes a moment to process.

“Jon?”

“Hm?”

“Yes or no to lunch?”

Perhaps it’s not the most responsible thing, to leave Martin and Sasha to the mercy of the worms, but they’ll be here again, just as they were, when Jon wakes at the start of the loop. There’s no room for regrets on a day that ends only as it is beginning again. And, come on, what does Jon have to lose?

“Yes,” Jon says, sounding more certain than he feels, and feeling reckless. “I think I can take one lunch break away from the Institute.”

Tim grins at him, pleasantly surprised if Jon is to judge by the look on his face. “Perfect. What are you in the mood for?”

Jon answers without missing a beat, echoing Tim’s own words back at him: “How about Korean?”

Chapter Text

“I wasn’t really expecting you to say yes,” Tim confides as they step out into the noon sunshine, the ever-lengthening shadows of the Archives a distant memory in Jon’s mind.

“Why did you ask?” Jon says, not offended, but deeply curious. He can feel the back of his hands thawing beneath a sun perched high. There’s something unequivocally pleasant about warmth tingling life back into icy fingers. There’s something uncomplicated about it that Jon likes.

Tim lifts his shoulders in a subtle shrug. “Sasha’s busy, Martin already ate in the canteen, and I heard you were in a good mood today so I thought I’d give it a go.”

Jon quickens his pace, falling into step with Tim as they dodge a woman pushing a pram. “You heard? ” Jon repeats.

“Yeah.”

“From whom?” Jon asks because Tim has just said this like he’s reciting the weather forecast. Looks like clear skies today, folks, with a 12% chance of scattered sniping, and only a few dirty looks blowing in from the northeast this afternoon. More updates shortly.

Jon has no need for an emotional meteorologist, thank you. No need for any kind of meteorologist, really, not when it’s always 29th July and it’s always so damn hot.

“From Martin,” Tim replies and Jon nearly trips over a crack in the pavement.

“You talked about me?” Jon says much too eagerly. His voice is doing something odd, grating in the way a squeaky door hinge is. He reminds himself that he already did this whole pining thing but there’s a saying about old habits that Jon finds incredibly apposite just now.

“You are our boss, boss.”

“No, of course it’s expected that you would discuss me in a professional capacity,” Jon says hurriedly. “However, you know my opinion on office gossip.”

“Mhm.”

“A researcher’s natural curiosity is more useful when focused—”

“On official investigations in the workplace,” Tim finishes, monotone. “I remember.”

Jon nods. It’s simpler than it should be to settle back into the role of the disdainful academic, like slipping into shedded skin to see that it still fits even though you could have sworn you grew at least two or three centimeters since you wore it last. Jon almost grimaces at that image.

“Did he—did he say anything else?”

Jon was too stubborn and too oblivious the first time around, but there’s a place in him scraped hollow, some things he was always too embarrassed to ask Martin about. He hasn’t got the Eye’s influence in stripping truth bare anymore but Jon has always been curious. If he’s going to be rooted to this day for-presumably-ever, he might as well delve into the mysteries he’s left unturned.

Tim gives him a look somewhere between shocked and smug, mouth quirked but eyes wide. “Sure, Martin says lots of things.”

Jon is not going to mumble “about me?” under his breath. He is not going to take that bait.

“He mentioned that you were ready for the weekend.”

“It seems like Saturday will never arrive,” Jon says genuinely. It does seem like that.

“It’s been a long week,” Tim says.

Jon nods grimly.

As they approach the corner, Tim points out the red awning they’re headed for.

Jon, excited to get his first glimpse of the restaurant that he’s heard Tim rave about loop after loop, is first through the door.

The dining room is nearly full, tables packed in close against the windows. Jon inhales deeply, the air rich with the smells of sesame oil, ginger, and garlic. He makes for a narrow table, tucked against the far wall, but Tim pauses by the door to wave at a group seated near the back. Jon, thinking he recognises David and a few others from one of Research’s field teams, ducks his head, worried that they’ll pick out the guilt plain in his expression. Sorry for borrowing one of your vans without permission and ridiculing your equipment and hatching an elaborate plan to steal your hand soap and possibly your microwave.

Although, Jon reasons, none of that happened today, so it didn’t happen, full stop.

Tim seems to notice Jon’s hunched, guarded posture, and guides him away from the entrance, to claim a table of their own. Tim is sliding a menu against Jon’s numb palms; Jon can’t recall the moment the laminated sheet materialised in Tim’s hands.

“Any idea what you want to try?” Tim prompts. He has already set his menu down, fingers tapping out a cheerful beat against the tabletop.

“No, I’m not sure,” Jon says, not really referring to his lunch order.

“Bibimbap is popular,” Tim suggests.

“Mhm,” Jon murmurs distantly.

“Sasha always orders japchae—glass noodles—but I think it’s mostly because she thinks they look cool.”

Within the space of a blink, a waitress has slipped through the crowd toward them, a jittery young woman with dark fringe.

Tim rattles off his order, lovingly memorised by now, but Jon’s eyes have found the back of David’s head once more, across the dining room, and he thinks wistfully of sweaty hands on the steering wheel, Martin’s plots of petty thievery, Martin’s laugh steaming against the windshield, Martin’s shy smile washed red and orange behind a lens.

“And for you, sir?”

Jon startles, looking up at the waitress. “Erm, the same.”

She jots something down on her notepad and wanders off to another group of customers.

Tim leans forward so Jon can hear him. “Can I tell you the truth?”

Jon frowns hesitantly, not aware that Tim had been anything but honest these past few minutes. “Yes, you can.”

Tim folds his hands together, thinks better of it, and splays his fingers out across the table, grounding himself. Grounding Jon too, really. “Look, I know you’re an adult, Jon. You can take care of yourself, and I normally wouldn’t do anything like this, but—”

Ah. A but.

“The real reason I suggested lunch was because I thought it might do you good to get out of the Archives for a bit.”

“That’s the very reason I accepted,” Jon says.

Tim’s eyebrows shoot up, and he knocks his elbow against the edge of the table in surprise. “Oh.”

Jon knows that Tim expected him to put up a fight at the notion that Jon should be anywhere other than his office during daylight hours on a weekday. Jon himself half expected to put up a fight.

“I’m glad to hear that you’re prioritising self-care then,” Tim says. “Cause Martin said you didn’t go home last night.”

So Martin did say more about him.

Jon coughs around a dry throat. “I had some important matters to attend to in my office.”

“Right.”

“I’m fine, Tim.”

“Yeah, that’s the weird part.”

Jon blinks at him. “What?”

“I don’t know what’s fine about finding worms in your desk drawers.” Tim delivers it like a joke; it isn’t.

“I can’t afford anything but a level head,” Jon says darkly.

“No one can keep that up forever, not even you, Jon. We’ve all got to have a scream now and again.” 

“A scream,” Jon repeats. “That sounds counterproductive.”

“Muffled scream, into a pillow,” Tim amends, waving his hands like he can brush the air away to reveal the exact phrase that he’s searching for. “Traps all the…panic particles.”

“Fascinating,” Jon says flatly.

“I know.” Tim bites down on a grin, but his smirk bleeds through.

“Where’d you read that?” Jon asks innocently.

“Uh, a medical journal.”

Jon nods thoughtfully. “You’ll have to tell Rosie to pass that advice along to any visitors submitting written statements. If not for trembling hands and those damned panic particles we might be able to actually figure out their handwriting for once.”

“Sasha and I are still working on deciphering yours, ” Tim admits.

“It’s cursive, Tim.”

“That’s certainly a word for it.”

Jon grumbles a retort, just under his breath, but something inside him is floaty and light. It’s been so long since Tim’s playful jabs didn’t have any real bite to them. Jon sinks into silence, wallowing in the comforting clatter of a busy kitchen, and the relief of strangely kind insults.

Tim lowers his voice surreptitiously, taking Jon’s silence as an endorsement for him to launch into a whispered account of a particularly vicious love triangle in Artefact Storage, a messy situation made much worse by the unfortunate interference of a fourteenth century tome dictating an incantation for infatuation.

Jon, perhaps indulgently, temporarily rolls back his strict policy on office gossip.

Somewhere, a kettle whistles.

And Jon starts his day craving bibimbap.

When Tim suggests Korean, Jon pounces on the opportunity, eager to numb his memories of yet another long night in the hospital waiting room—this time with Tim, not Martin, sitting in the stiff chair beside him—with the warm, peppery taste of gochujang.

Lost in a bowl of sautéed vegetables, Jon hardly notices when Tim taps him on the wrist, trying to get his attention.

"Jon?"

"Hm?" Jon says, muffled through a bite of shiitake mushroom.

"Look, I normally wouldn't do this because I know it's annoying to have someone breathing down your neck," Tim says. Jon doesn't know how he hasn't noticed it before, but there's something firm in Tim's nonchalance, something of a laid-back older brother still in his voice.

"We've just been a little worried about you lately," Tim explains. "I mean, you leave the Archives later and later, sometimes not at all. And you always find some way to change the subject whenever one of us brings up the worm situation."

"Us? We?" Jon echoes.

"Yeah. Me, Martin, Sasha."

"But mostly Martin."

Tim tilts his head back and forth, a nod that doesn't want to be a nod. "Well, you know how Martin gets."

Jon pauses, staring into his bowl. A thought has just occurred to him, something that didn't cross his mind the first time Tim made the invitation to lunch official. "Did Martin put you up to this?" he asks.

Tim shakes his head, grinning lopsidedly. "No, but please don't give him any ideas. I think he's this close to drugging your tea so you might get some sleep for once." He pinches his fingers together to demonstrate.

Jon frowns, suddenly reminded of the heaviness of his eyelids. He kind of assumed that he didn't require sleep, partly because the nature of the time loop seemed to take care of his other circadian needs, partly because he’s already living a nightmare.

Tim scrutinises his expression with concern. "That was a joke by the way."

"I know."

Tim leans back, still watching Jon like he's a tropical storm headed straight for hurricane status. Like he's a landmine. Jon blinks hard, trying not to think about detonators.

Jon can't remember the last time he's been able to sleep with his eyes closed.

"Perhaps I should take your advice," Jon says. "I think I could benefit from some rest."

Tim smiles at him, relieved. "Glad I could help, boss."

Jon doesn't bristle at the title, not today. "Thank you for this, Tim. It feels like forever since I've had a break."

Tim sits up, eyes round with innocence. "Oh, but we're very much on the clock. This is a very professional, very scholarly lunch meeting that we're having as colleagues."

"But—"

"Especially when the Institute is gracious enough to cover the cost, in the name of academia, of course," Tim winks conspicuously. "Right, boss?"

"In the name of academia," Jon agrees, amused.

Almost as if summoned, Jon's phone vibrates on the table, caller ID lit up unmistakably. Elias Bouchard.

Tim snorts, unable to contain himself. "Mr. Bouchard himself, calling to compliment us on all our hard work surely," he says, adding a posh flair to the words.

Jon doesn't laugh along with him, certain that somewhere a shelf has collapsed and things have gone terribly wrong.

At the kettle’s whistle, Jon is up from his chair, tripping over the blanket that has slipped from his shoulders and pooled in a heap at his feet.

Jon spins wildly across his office, kicking his ankles free of the tangled blanket, less like a hurricane, more like a tornado.

He manages to get the blanket loose just as he rounds on the door, throwing it open to reveal a very startled Martin, who leaps back, nearly dropping the tea tray in his grip. The cup teeters and shivers, and so does Martin for a moment.

"Good morning," Jon says. "Excuse me, Martin." He slips past Martin in the doorway, reaching out to steady the unstable cup as he passes.

"You're—you're going out?" Martin asks, astonished. There's a crease in the center of his forehead that Jon wants to reach out and smooth.

"I forgot my…phone at home," Jon says slowly and maybe not very convincingly.

"I thought you stayed in your office last night."

"I won't be long," Jon assures him.

"Oh. Okay."

Jon is already on his way to the lift, someplace very important to be.

Back in his flat, Jon collapses in bed, expecting exhaustion to take him, smother his senses unapologetically as it always had during that first year in the Archives. Falling asleep wasn't the difficult part then; oftentimes Jon had been too stubborn (too busy, he told himself) to allow the gentle gravity of eyelids drooping shut to prevail.

It should be easy like Tim said. This should make him better.

But now Jon lies awake, out of practice.

At first, he blames the pillows for their lumpiness, the way they sag in all the wrong places. Next, he reprimands the unyielding mattress, the slit in the curtains through which grey morning light creeps in.

Jon thinks he hears the buckling of a shelf, the crack of plaster. He turns on his side, cupping one hand over his ear to block out the sound.

A wrinkle on the duvet, creased in shadow, sprouts eight legs and crawls toward Jon's outstretched arm. Jon snatches his fingers away, flipping over onto his other side.

Something slides past Jon's calf beneath the bedsheets and he feels Martin's panicked breaths against his neck. It's really bad out there.

On instinct, Jon draws his legs upward, tucking them against himself.

He breathes. Rolls over onto his back. The image of the small circle of Sasha's mouth, puckered with realisation in the document storage room, flickers across the ceiling. Where's Tim? Oh God, he hasn’t—

"He has," Jon whispers. "He has, he has, he has."

Fitful sleep comes at him, viciously angry, leaving claw marks.

"This is good for you," Tim remarks over the din of the other customers, in particular, David's obnoxious guffaws at a table near the back.

Jon looks up from his dish. Today he's sampling japchae, Sasha’s supposed favourite order. (Admittedly, the noodles do look pretty cool.)

Jon nods. "Korean food is high in fiber which promotes digestive health. Not to mention, fermented foods like kimchi—"

"Sure, but that's not what I meant," Tim interrupts.

Jon gives him a curious look.

"This. " Tim waves a hand around at the restaurant. "Escaping a bit, talking about something other than statements."

They did just finish an animated discussion regarding a dream of Tim's that involved penguins. Jon tried to pinpoint the exact species, but Tim's descriptions did not do much to help.

(Tim insisted that they'd been "the ones from Happy Feet" as if this piece of information was supposed to mean anything to Jon.)

"I suppose you're right," Jon says. It is good for him. So, good in fact that that prickle of guilt that follows him like smoke on the breeze, the hazy nights in the hospital, feel more and more like petty annoyances. This scares Jon, but he tries not to think about it much. And when everything returns to how it was each morning, what's the use?

What's the use (of any of it)?

Jon couches his thoughts in parentheses, thinking the parts he wants to ignore more softly, quietly, than he should.

He'll get back to it, really he will. He'll get right back to problem-solving like he had in the beginning.

How many loops ago now? (Let's not think about that.)

"You should do this more often," Tim says, jabbing at the air with his chopsticks to punctuate the suggestion.

"Lunch out with you everyday?" Jon asks, as if that isn't what he's already been doing.

Tim shrugs, deceptively noncommittal. "You might get bored of me after a while." He smirks. "I know, hard to believe."

Jon thinks of Sasha at her keyboard, her mumbles of “just a minute” or “you go on without me; I’ve almost finished up here.”

“I think it would take quite a bit of convincing to lure Sasha away from her computer for lunch,” he says.

“I suppose you could always ask Martin.” Tim lifts his gaze to meet Jon’s experimentally, testing the waters. For a second, Jon imagines the lens of a thermal camera staring back at him from Tim’s pupils, reading his infrared signature.

“Martin?” Jon repeats dumbly.

Tim shrugs, casual as anything. “This might be good for him too.”

Jon feels his face grow warm. God, how oblivious had he been? How many of Tim’s blatant matchmaking missions had slipped by unnoticed?

“Maybe,” Jon says. He fumbles for his glass, hoping he won’t be so flustered after a sip of water.

“Just an idea,” Tim says lightly.

“Yeah.”

Jon is dimly aware that he shouldn’t, dimly aware that someone ought to do something about this whole 29th July business, dimly aware that there is no such thing as forever, but he has lunch plans and it can wait.

Jon has never really asked someone out before. It’s an embarrassing truth. Georgie was the one to make the first move. The closest Jon has come was that whole gouge your eyes out and run away with me fiasco, which didn’t exactly turn out as planned.

Perhaps, he should make a list? It’s been a while since the last one, a while since he’s needed one, Jon realises guiltily.

Jon paces back and forth across his office, giving the shadows that now ring the perimeter of the room a wide berth.

“Martin, Tim mentioned that you might want to—” Jon turns on his heel, wringing his hands.

“Have you been to that restaurant with the—” He sighs, tracing a path around his desk.

“Korean food has a multitude of health benefits. Would you like to hear some?”

Jon groans. 

This is stupid, objectively stupid. If he makes a fool of himself today, there will always be the clean slate of tomorrow. What’s so bad about a bruised ego when Jon is black and blue ten times over, all his hurts beneath the skin?

Martin’s tentative knock sounds against the door, and a wave of nausea rears its head.

“Come in,” Jon croaks.

Martin opens the door slowly, making sure the tray in his hands doesn’t bump against the doorframe. “Sorry, I wasn’t sure if you were sleeping in here.”

“No need to apologise.”

Martin sets the tea down with a soft clink. He lingers there, fingertips perched on the edge of Jon’s desk. “Did you sleep well?” he asks.

“I think so. No dreams.” Jon hesitates. “Thank you for the blanket.”

Martin flushes. “I always seem to have extra and it’s been a warm July,” he says, but doesn’t deny it.

“Very warm.”

“Yeah.”

Nothing to be afraid of, Jon reminds himself.

“Do you want to grab lunch?” He says it in a rush of breath, almost as surprised that he got it out as Martin looks to hear it spoken.

“You can say no,” he adds quickly, because he’s done compelling people and he’s not sure Martin knows that telling his boss no is an option at this point.

“Oh,” Martin says, eyes wide. “Uh, yeah. Sure.”

“Is the canteen alright with you?” Jon asks, not wanting to risk a chance encounter with Tim. “There’s a few, er, housing records I could use your help looking over.”

“Yeah, that should be—that should be fine.” Martin gives him a diplomatic smile.

“And, um, thank you for the tea, Martin,” Jon says.

Martin leans back from the desk as Jon makes his way over to examine the cup and its familiar, only somewhat less irritating by now, slogan.

Martin nods. “You’re welcome.” He drifts over to the door, hesitance clear in the shortness of his steps, and just as Jon thinks he’ll stay a moment more, Martin disappears out into the corridor.

There’s something distinctly glum about the Institute’s mashed potatoes. Jon thinks it might be the flat flavour of corporate despair, which to be fair, isn’t far off from what he imagines cardboard to taste like. Jon fiercely misses that red awning, the cramped tables, and the sting of spice on the underside of his tongue, but swallows around the queasy feeling rising in his throat as he forces another gob of mash down.

Martin, sculpting a small mound out of his peas, looks up at Jon. “So, you mentioned some housing records, right? Did something weird come up with Andre Ramao’s documents again?”

“What?” Jon says distantly. “Oh, I must have left them on my desk. My head’s been a bit…wrong, I guess, lately.”

Martin nods sympathetically. “Mine too.” He laughs, a stilted, brittle sound that catches Jon in the gut. “It’s kind of hard to maintain that work-life balance when I’ve got a bunch of file cabinets for roommates.”

“At least they’re not too loud, I hope?”

Martin cocks his head, contemplative. “No, they’re actually rather polite. No wild parties or anything, never late with the rent.”

Jon can’t resist grinning at his lumpy mashed potatoes. “Sounds like excellent company.”

Martin shrugs. “They’re a little boring, but very good listeners.”

Jon snorts, almost violently, and Martin’s eyebrows shoot up, shocked, as if to wonder, did I really do that?

Jon can tell by the look on Martin’s face that from the very first quip, he’d been expecting Jon to shut him down as per usual. He’d been expecting a blunt, disinterested reply, maybe even a “no, Martin, metal receptacles for storing documents do not classify as your roommates, no matter how pathetic and lonely you are.”

“Perhaps you should introduce us,” Jon says matter-of-factly. “I’m afraid I’m not very skilled at making friends.”

“Of course. I’m sure you’ll find that you have loads in common.”

Jon smiles, watching the feathery shadows cast by Martin’s lower lashes, a welcome distraction from the darker splotches that skirt by at the edges of his vision, inkier with every passing second.

“Are you familiar with the concept of a time loop, Martin?”

Martin, once again doing something vaguely architectural with his peas, gives Jon a curious look. “Like Groundhog Day?”

“Precisely.”

Martin nods. “I think so, why?”

Jon steeples his fingers, hands propped up in a makeshift tent, a hiding place. “What would you do,” he says carefully. “If you were stuck reliving the same day over and over again?”

Martin thinks for a moment. “I dunno. Catch up on sleep, maybe?”

“What if you can’t sleep?”

“Why can’t I sleep?” Martin asks, arms crossed.

“Well, say you get bored of sleeping after a few loops,” Jon answers. He doesn’t say, Because you have nightmares that reach out and scratch you up till you’re awake.

“Hm,” Martin hums, deep in thought. “If no one else will remember anything, maybe I’d try getting a couple things off my chest.”

“Like what?” Jon leans forward despite himself. He tried his hand at the truth, and things had a tendency to end rather explosively.

“Grudges, apologies, a few choice words for Elias.” Martin breaks eye contact, suddenly self-conscious under Jon’s scrutiny. “I’d just, uh, stand up for myself, really.”

“Confessions?” Jon mutters, mostly to himself, as he considers if he has anything left to confess.

Martin nearly chokes on his peas nonetheless, his face pale. “No, not—not personally,” he croaks.

Jon is silent for a few seconds, watching Martin’s cheeks regain their colour. “What else?” he asks.

After careful deliberation, Martin says, “I guess I’d get a dog.”

“A dog?”

“Yeah, well, my old flat was too small, and I never had time to properly care for one. Besides, I can’t exactly move a pet with me into the Archives.” Martin glances up, apologetic. “That one time was an accident, I swear. My hands were full and I hardly noticed when he slipped through the door and he was really fast—like really fast, and that dog seemed to know his way around the Archives better than I did at that point—”

“Yes, Martin,” Jon interrupts. “I know.”

Martin reaches for his glass, but sets it down without drinking. “I think it’d be easier than human company.”

It takes Jon a second to realise that Martin is not referring to their current lunch not-quite-date, but once again to his hypothetical time loop dog.

“How so?”

Martin folds a crease into his napkin, distracted. “That’s the thing about time loops, right? You never really get anywhere, so you can’t talk to new people. You end up having the same interactions, running through the same script. It’s different with dogs.”

“I doubt dogs are immune to time loops,” Jon says.

“No, but you don’t have to explain anything to them,” Martin points out. “And it won’t really matter if you start as strangers.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

These are rare words out of Jon’s lips, and Martin looks appropriately shocked, mouth just short of hanging open.

“What would you do?” Martin asks. “With all that time?”

Besides waste it?

“Try to get out,” Jon says wearily.

“Would you tell anyone?”

“I don’t think I could find anyone to believe me,” Jon admits. 

“Oh, but there’s a simple solution,” Martin says, his eyes bright with ingenuity. He is the brightest thing in the room, Jon’s sure of it. Back, Jon tells the shadows, and for once, they listen.

“What’s that?”

“You ask someone to think of a word, the first one that pops into their head, so on the next loop you’ll be able to recite it just as they’re saying it for what they think is the first time,” Martin explains. “There’s no way you’d be able to get it right with a random guess.”

Jon smirks, sceptical. “ You would believe me if I tried that and it worked?”

“I would have to,” Martin says, his jaw set seriously. “It’s my plan, after all.”

“I would hardly call that a plan. ”

“You did just give me a weirdly specific hypothetical situation,” Martin protests. “I think it’s a rather good plan considering.”

“Alright,” Jon says, his finger-tent collapsing in on itself. “Let’s give it a go.”

Martin blinks at him. “Sorry?”

“Tell me your random word.”

Martin fidgets with one of his sleeves, picking at a loose thread. The habit feeds Martin’s nervous energy right into Jon, and Jon feels his leg begin to bounce beneath the table, agitated.

“Now?” Martin asks.

“Do you need a countdown?”

“No, that’s fine,” Martin says. “I’ll just—I guess I’ll just—” 

“First one that pops into your head,” Jon reminds him.

Martin nods, chewing at his lip. “Spaniel? I think. Is that good?”

Jon nods in approval, that rush of purpose returning so intensely that it adds another layer of dizziness to Jon’s already perpetual headache. Jon is a researcher again with a hypothesis to test, a question to cling to before the incomprehensibility of forever pulls him under and steals the breath from him the lungs, the sting of guilt from his eyes, or douses the flame that still roars one more try in his chest.

“It’s perfect,” Jon says.

“So, you want me to…say the first word that comes to mind?” Martin is motionless with the sort of frantic calm that you might expect from a student who is staring down at the first question of an exam that they did not study for.

“Yes.” Jon, Martin’s reciprocal, bounces his leg beneath the table, a jittery buzz like static crackling through his veins. “The very first one you think of. It’s a mind exercise, meant to stimulate creativity.”

“Okay,” Martin says slowly.

“I’ll count down,” Jon offers.

“Right.”

“On three,” Jon clarifies.

Martin nods.

“One. Two—”

Jon has his next few lines scripted. He drafted them last night in the waiting room, bundling himself in predictability while Tim and Sasha were being wrapped in bandages a few doors down.

Jon thinks it will go like this—

 

Martin: Spaniel.

Jon: Spaniel.

[Hold for DRAMATIC PAUSE of realisation.]

Martin: Wha— How did you— How could you possibly know what I was going to say?

Jon: Because that’s what you said when I asked yesterday—well, today technically.

Martin: (thoroughly confused) But you’ve never asked me that before.

Jon: I have. In fact, you’re the one who gave me the idea.

[Optional DRAMATIC PAUSE.]

Jon: I take it you’re familiar with the concept of a time loop, Martin?

There is comfort in precognition, just as there is comfort in lists. Jon thinks they might be the same thing after all. Sentences punctuated with bullet points; a checklist of call and response.

Jon thinks it will go like this—an inexorable procession of pauses and the words between them. Stammers and sharp inhales and waiting patiently for his cues.

Perhaps, most predictably of all, it does not go like this.

“Spaniel,” Jon recites.

“Enjambment,” Martin says. 

A deviation from his preordained lines.

Of course, Jon thinks bitterly. Extraneous variables don’t lead to replicable results, and two very different conversations, when culminating in the same question, will not yield the same response.

“Is that it?” Martin asks. “Did I do it right?”

“Yes,” Jon sighs. “You did.”

Martin gives him a relieved smile, the skin around his eyes softening, and Jon’s leg goes still, his heel hitting the ground with a defeated thud.

Jon is staring, he realises, but so is Martin, and Jon can’t bring himself to look away, imagining what it would be like to tell him everything—pointless sacrifice, tape recorder audiences, and a couple broken promises short of the end of the world. Imagining what it would be like for Martin to believe him.

Jon is seeing things perhaps, but he thinks he recognises the mist swirling around Martin’s pupils, shading his irises slate blue. He blinks and it isn’t there anymore.

Martin leans forward slightly, his face pitched toward Jon’s, and Jon freezes, remembering their first kiss in the safehouse’s kitchen—Jon’s forearms spattered with cake batter and Martin, laughing, his stomach pressed up against the counter, so he could reach Jon.

Jon can’t help but hold his breath as Martin studies him.

Martin’s features scrunch together, perplexed. 

Jon’s lungs burn.

Finally, Martin opens his mouth and asks, “Is that a paper clip mark on your cheek?”

Jon sits in his usual chair in the waiting room, watching Martin’s hands, white-knuckled, gripping his armrests.

Martin has asked Jon four times now the same question: “Do you think they’ll be alright?”

Do you think they’ll be alright? as if Jon is a doctor instead of a very tired time traveler.

“Yes, everything will be okay,” Jon has answered each time, more mantra than promise.

Eventually, everything will be okay. He just doesn’t know how far eventually is, or if he’ll even make it there.

Jon listens as footsteps click down the hall outside, some nurse in a blue-scrubbed blur, and he thinks of extraneous variables, thinks of controls and replication.

And thinks that he’s stalled long enough.

Chapter Text

“Sasha’s made it out,” Martin relays, stepping back from the window set into the door, a single pane separating them from whatever doom Prentiss has arranged.

Jon doesn't remember what his strategy was for this loop, but he’s pretty sure it did not involve sitting on Martin’s cot in document storage, knees tucked up against his chest. The air is sort of fuzzy, the molecules grown lazy and languid. Jon feels like something ancient, a polaroid now faded and blurry around his edges.

“Tim ran into the office,” Martin says. “I don’t know if he—”

He bites his lip, cutting off his next few words, and settles for, “I don’t know.”

Martin watches Jon, waiting for reassurance or a verdict or a solution.

Jon doesn’t know why everyone expects him to have all the answers. It was fine when he was essentially a human-shaped Google (who occasionally did some recreational smiting) but now he’s just…

Jon.

“Martin, I think I might be dreaming," Jon says abruptly.

It’s an idea that’s been burning a hole through his subconscious for some time now—that maybe he’s not really somewhere or some when else, that maybe he isn’t anywhere at all. Dreaming or dead or in some kind of purgatory.

Jon is staring at his palms, wondering which crease is his lifeline, and why it has to be so bloody long, but he hears the shuffle of Martin’s feet as he moves away from the door. The cot creaks under the added weight as Martin sits. The space between Martin's thigh and Jon’s fingers, thoughtfully tangled in the blanket, is cavernous.

"That would explain a lot," Martin admits lightly. "But those worms seemed pretty real, and they gave you much more than a pinch."

"Well, you would say that if you were a figment of my imagination," Jon grumbles.

"I'm not a figment of your imagination, Jon."

"You'd say that too."

"Okay," Martin says, frustration creeping into his voice. "How do you usually tell whether you're dreaming?"

Jon shrugs. "I just wait until I wake up, I suppose."

"You can't wake up from reality," Martin points out. "Believe me, I'd much rather be safe in bed, but I—I don't think that's an option."

"How do you know ?" Jon's throat constricts around the question and it comes out desperate, almost whiny. The blanket is pinned so tightly between his fingers that he thinks it might tear. Something is going to tear.

Martin stares at him, searching Jon’s eyes for a scrap of lucidity. “Did you watch Inception last night or something? Where’s this coming from?”

Jon shakes his head but remains silent.

Martin smooths out a wrinkle on his trousers. “Well, um—you could—I think Leonardo DiCaprio used a totem. His name wasn’t actually Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie, but I’ve only watched it once and the ending was kind of lost on me—the whole thing with limbo and his wife and whatever they kept saying about a train—so I can’t really remember what the main character was called.”

“A totem?” Jon asks.

“Yeah, he had a small object, a top, that only he knew the exact properties of—like it’s weight, how long it could spin without toppling over—so if he was in a dream, no one else would be able to replicate it just right, and he’d know.”

“I don’t have one of those.”

Martin thinks for a moment. “Maybe you can’t know. Maybe you just sense it.”

“How?” Jon says, a bleak echo of himself.

“You focus on what feels real, find an anchor,” Martin says. His face is close now, close enough for Jon to feel Martin’s breath stirring the air.

An anchor. Jon’s hands instinctively drift toward his ribcage. He’d done that. He’d made an anchor of his bones, ripped a part of himself out to have a tether to cling to. But Martin was still the one to bring him back. Jon had followed the call of the tape recorders, but more than that, it had been Martin’s careful urgency, Martin’s hushed prayers that had coaxed Jon out of the Buried.

 “Where do I find one?” Jon says dumbly, even though Martin is sitting right there, just enough distance between them for it to be too far.

“It doesn’t have to be a physical object,” Martin says, scooting a few centimeters closer as he turns to fully face Jon. Jon thinks he is still much too far. “Do you know when you have an anxiety attack and they tell you to ground yourself by counting down, using your senses to describe your surroundings?”

“The five-four-three-two-one method.”

“Mhm.” Martin nods encouragingly. “You could always try something like that.”

Jon inhales deeply, hesitating. “What do you feel, Martin?” Jon is too numb, wrapped in unrelenting shadow. Perhaps Martin can sense for the both of them. 

Martin laughs, a nervous sound that flaps feebly in his mouth. “I feel fucking terrified,” he says simply, jagged in its honesty. “And I know it’s real, and not just some ridiculously elaborate nightmare, because my heart’s beating so fast that I’d have woken up by now.”

Impulsively, Martin reaches for Jon’s hand. “Here,” he says, and presses the palm against his chest, slightly to the left of his sternum.

Jon stares at his fingertips, pulsing with the pound of blood pumping inside Martin’s left ventricle. Martin’s heart thunders on, frantic but steady, hammering out the most beautiful music Jon’s ever heard. This is real. This is real.

Jon looks up at Martin’s face to find his mouth rounded in compound surprise at his own boldness and the fact that Jon has not withdrawn his fingers. Maybe Jon should drop his hand, maybe Martin should recoil from his touch, but neither dares to move. Jon doesn’t want all of 29th July over and over again. He just wants to live in this moment, his palm throbbing with the knowledge of life surging within Martin’s chest.

Something thumps against the door with a sickening squelch, and Martin flinches violently backwards. Jon lets his hand fall into his lap, trying not to feel so disappointed.

Suddenly, the fire alarm begins to screech, its screams prodding at Jon’s headache. Jon shuts his eyes tight against the noise. That familiar, dark, abysmal riptide tugs at him, insistent on sweeping him off to wherever or whenever he’s meant to be. Jon has been cut and pasted, collaged into 2016 with barely enough glue to make him stick. He has a feeling it won’t hold much longer.

Five, he thinks.

His eyes flutter open. Five. What can you see?

Jon makes another list.

One: Martin, his shoulders quaking from his shivery, short exhales.

Two: the writhing silhouettes of worms, cast through the slit beneath the door.

Three: a flash of Prentiss’ puckered skin through the window.

Four: the glint of the corkscrew as it pokes out of Martin’s pocket.

Five: the shadows, always the shadows.

Inhale. Exhale.

Four. What can you feel?

One: Martin’s blanket, rough and ragged between Jon’s clenched knuckles.

Two: the sting of his new scars.

Three: the phantom dent of the paper clip against his cheek.

Martin’s hand finds his, something to fill the gaping space between them.

Four: Martin’s fingers, firm but delicate around Jon’s like he’s holding a fragile thing. It’s the way he holds tea when he’s filled the cup up to the rim, careful not to make any sudden movements that might result in a spill.

Bang. The wall shudders. Bang. Martin’s grip tightens on Jon’s hand.

Three. What can you hear?

One: something shrill between the sound of the fire alarm’s screeches and a kettle’s whine.

Two: Tim’s incessant banging as he tries to burst through the wall and right into document storage.

Three: Martin’s rapid, frightened puffs of breath.

Two. What can you smell?

One: the earthy, decomposing stink of worms that Jon can’t ever seem to expel from his sinuses.

Two: the stale, peppermint scent of car air freshener. Martin has one tucked beneath his pillow, presumably in an attempt to fight off the worm smell.

Bang.

“Jon?” Martin whispers. “What is that?”

“Nothing to worry about,” Jon says. “Only Tim.” He squeezes Martin’s hand gently, out of habit.

“Tim’s doing that?”

One. What can you taste?

This is the shortest list of all.

One: Guilt.

It tastes metallic, almost like blood.

Artefact Storage is much busier than Jon remembers. There are definitely more elbows jabbing at Jon as he pushes past, definitely more employees in almost comically oversized, rubber gloves grunting under the weight of heavy crates, the contents of said crates oftentimes grunting right back. Jon, weaponising the sharp angles of his own elbows to shove his way through the entrance, dodges a man holding tightly to the lid of a trembling jar of orange marmalade.

Jon manages to clear a path to Sonja’s desk, directing one last fleeting look toward the agitated jar of preserves. He is relieved that, at the very least, not all the Institute’s messes are his to clean up. Just the big ones, just the ones that feel like breathing in hurt.

Sonja hardly spares him a glance over the top of her computer monitor, twirling a wispy strand of hair around one of her fingers.

Jon clears his throat. “Would you mind if I took a look at the inventory logs for last week? There was a delivery for me—a table. I think it ended up here.”

Sonja gives him a terse nod, leaning forward as she scans the artefact database’s outdated font. Finally, her eyes dart back up to Jon’s face, suddenly suspicious. “I’m not seeing anything. Were you the one who signed for it?”

“No, I think Rosie did.”

Sonja squints at her screen with renewed effort. “Okay, found it.”

“I’d like to examine it further if that’s alright,” Jon says. “To determine exactly how dangerous it is.”

“We do a threat assessment as a part of the standard entry process,” Sonja says, voice even but her message clear. Don’t tell me how to do my job.

“Yes, of course,” Jon says, trying to keep the acidity from lacing his tone. “I know.”

He should know. That first week, at his new desk in the Archives, sanity already beginning to crumble, collarbones already beginning to crack under the pressure, Jon had claimed the employee handbook as his holy text. There might as well have been indents on his fingertips from the paragraphs gripped between them. He read that pamphlet into the ground, buried himself with it, and built himself back up with the comforting structure of procedure.

It hadn’t done much to help Jon prepare for all that was in store.

“I think I could provide some additional insight. The table is directly related to an archived statement, and I believe there is certainly enough evidence to suggest that keeping it here is a reckless mistake.”

Sonja laughs, actually laughs at him. Jon isn’t even angry, not really. Where fury should sear him, instead he finds his chest caving in beneath the weight of resignation. God, how unaware they all are.

“Trust me, we’ve handled things much worse than tables,” she says.

“I don’t think you understand. If I could just transport it down to the Archives—”

Jon has no intention of bringing the table anywhere near Sasha. In fact, his plan involves a lot of improvisation, perhaps another one of the field team’s vans, and a storage locker somewhere far, far away from here.

“Look,” Sonja insists, her monotone cut through with impatience now. “There’s nothing I can do for you without authorisation. I can’t just hand over our inventory to anyone who walks in.”

Jon holds in a scoff. “Authorisation? From whom?”

“Normally, department heads can discharge artefacts after completing the proper paperwork, but Mr. Bouchard has requested that all requests received from the Archives are first personally approved by him.”

Jon falters. “When was this request made?”

“This morning, I think.”

Fear clutches Jon close in a suffocating embrace. Voyeuristic bastard, Jon thinks. But how much has he seen? How much of Jon’s swirling memory has been broadcasted? If there’s anyone perceptive enough to have noticed Jon’s ripples, it's Jonah Magnus. 

Jon rakes his eyes across the wall, gaze catching on the blinking red pupils of a mounted security camera.

“Are you watching?” he whispers, staring the camera down.

To Sonja, he says: “Right. Okay. Thank you for your help.”

Sonja nods, disinterested, waiting for him to leave.

Jon doesn’t leave. He pushes his sleeves up, the fabric unsettlingly smooth against his unscarred forearms.

And he charges into the aisles, labels and numeric tags streaking past. Someone shouts a warning from behind him, or maybe it’s a threat. Jon clumsily spins around a corner and veers into a shelf. Something shatters in his wake, but Jon is already skidding to a stop before the table. He takes hold of it, eyes carefully averted from its hypnotic design, and lifts. His arms quiver from the effort.

It is much heavier than Jon has anticipated.

“Move,” he grunts. “Come on, you stupid thing.” One of the table’s legs squeals against the floor.

Jon gives one more desperate tug before rough hands clamp down around his shoulders, and his fingers are pried loose, grip going slack.

“We have to do something, ” Sasha says, muscles tensed.

Jon sits, sagged against a file cabinet in document storage, the back of his arms meeting cool metal. He isn’t proud of the fact that he’s propping his weight up against one of Martin’s unflinchingly polite roommates. So much for first impressions.

“Tim!” Martin shouts, pummeling the glass pane with his fist. “Behind you!”

“He can’t hear you,” Jon says, feeling limp and deflated.

Not this again. Jon is quite fed up with the word again but it seems to be the only one that fits.

“Christ, she’s right there, ” Martin says, his voice hoarse.

There’s a wild light in Sasha’s eyes. She tucks a rouge curl behind her ear, shoves her glasses up on the bridge of her nose.

“Screw this.”

But it is Jon who reaches for the doorknob first this time. It is Jon who dodges Martin’s pleading touch, and escapes from the document storage room. It is Jon who leaves worm-shaped smudges crushed beneath his feet, mind racing as he scrambles to remember the instructions he’d given Martin so long ago.

Maintenance, one floor down, big lever. You can’t miss it.

Jon ducks into the nearest stairwell. His shoes slap a frenzied rhythm out on the steps, footfalls echoing. He descends the last few steps in one leap, sending a pang through his right ankle, but Jon is already running again.

He collides against a door labeled very clearly DO NOT ENTER and stumbles into a well-lit tunnel, pipes and wires winding their way like overgrown vines across the walls. Jon blinks the spots from his vision, and looks around for a lever, hopefully of the conspicuously bright red variety. He drifts over to an electrical panel, its lights flickering with some unknown purpose. He traces a path, following a long vein of exposed tubing fixed to the wall, praying that it will lead him to a sign marked “fire suppression system” and, as mentioned, a big lever.

Elias had mentioned a lever, hadn’t he, when Jon had asked? Jon’s hippocampus is less and less able to distinguish the events of that first 29th July from all the repeats that succeed it, but he must have.

Losing faith in his plan by the minute, Jon rounds a bend in the tunnel, and stops cold.

Directly before him is a lever set into the wall, not red, but an equally noticeable shade of neon yellow striped with black.

Also before him is the most unruffled man that Jon has ever seen, hair slicked back, gold dangling from his earlobes, his electric green eyes incongruous with the rest of his appearance. The former Pupil of the Eye. Elias Bouchard.

Jonah Magnus.

“Hello, Jon.” He says, his words curling, almost like the graceful flick of a cat’s tail. “Fancy meeting you here.” He stands between Jon and the lever protectively.

“Magnus,” Jon snarls. “I know what you are.”

“Oh, I can see that now.” Magnus grins, all sharpened teeth. “It seems like you had yourself quite the apocalypse. I do hope it was fun, all that power, all that beholding.”

“I killed you,” Jon says. “That was fun.”

Magnus continues airily, “Shame about the time loop. How long has it been now? You must be dreadfully bored if you’re spending your time wandering around Maintenance.”

Jon edges nearer but doesn’t give an answer. The truth is he doesn’t know if this is loop number thirty-eight or four thousand and five.

“I can offer some entertainment if you like,” Magnus says, his syllables clipped. “Perhaps a description of what Sasha’s up to right now?” He gives Jon a sympathetic look. “You did tell her to stay away from that table, didn’t you?”

Jon lunges for the lever, but Magnus’ icy fingers catch him by the wrist, pressing bruises into the skin there.

“Or how about Martin instead? You underestimate his stupidity if you think he’d hesitate a moment before chasing after you.”

“Shut up,” Jon snaps.

“Well, that’s not very polite.”

Jon rips his arm free of Magnus’ grasp, breathing hard. “What do you want?”

“Time is a precious thing, Jon. You can’t just go around clumsily shredding it to pieces,” Magnus reprimands, the tone of a patronising adult explaining why we don’t run with scissors. “There are great plans that must be put in motion.”

“Your plans.” 

“Oh, so you do understand.”

Jon sets his jaw stubbornly.

“Don’t be naive. You know how this ends.” 

“Not anymore,” Jon says.

Magnus sighs and shakes his head lightly. For a moment, Jon hears his grandmother’s voice in his ear. I’m not angry. I’m just disappointed, Jon.

“This is not about will or won’t,” Magnus laughs. “There is no right choice. There’s no choice at all.”

“You’re stalling,” Jon accuses.

Magnus cocks his head thoughtfully. “I suppose I am. Well-spotted.”

Jon leaps to the side and makes another blind grab, yanking down on the lever. The hiss of CO2 follows immediately, and the tunnels flood with a cloudy haze. Jon coughs, dizzy as the gas fills his nostrils and taints his inhales.

Magnus’ grin is not the one of a man who has been thwarted. This is how Jon knows that he’s failed, even before he hears Sasha’s scream.

Somewhere, a kettle whistles.

It sounds like it's screaming, Jon determines, wiping the paper clip from his cheekbone.

He waits for Martin’s knock at the door. After all these loops, it’s a safe, necessary thing.

"Come in," Jon says.

Martin makes his shy entrance as per usual, glasses fogged slightly as he maneuvers through the doorway, holding the tray close to his body.

"I wasn't sure if you were sleeping in here."

"Me neither," Jon confesses.

Martin pauses by the door, blinking at Jon in confusion. "Sorry?"

"I—I mean, the day's hardly started and it's already been eternity. I've been awake far too long perhaps."

Martin nods, something determined about his forced optimism, his bared teeth as he smiles at Jon. "At least there's always the weekend to look forward to."

Not always, Jon thinks. He would have never thought that he'd come out of this experience hating Fridays, but Jon is quite sick of the fifth day of the week by now. Give him a lethargic Wednesday or an apprehensive Sunday any time, but Friday? Friday is a taunting thing, the last box of crisps on a shelf just out of reach.

Martin is watching him with concern and wariness and something soft and unspoken that makes Jon want to twine their hands together, to draw in the warmth of Martin's palms, still heated from his gentle grip on Jon's mug while preparing his tea.

Instead, Jon says, "Here, I'll take that." He takes hold of the tea tray, redistributing its weight, balancing the wobbling cup as it makes the transition from Martin’s arms to his.

"Thank you, Martin," he says once the tray has been lowered onto his desk. And then, more cautiously, worried about scaring Martin off, he asks, "I never did tell you how I take my tea, did I? You just sort of figured it out."

Martin clasps his hands behind his back, elbows tucked in against his sides. "Yeah, I guess I did. But it's not as impressive as you make it sound."

"No?" Jon says, challenging.

Martin grins like a secret.

Jon lets himself bask in that grin for a minute, and then sighs. "I think you're right about the weekend. If I make it to Saturday morning."

Martin frowns and reaches for Jon, his fingers brushing the patch of unscarred skin above Jon's wrist. Jon does not have the good sense to shrink back or scold Martin for unprofessional physical contact and a blatant disregard for his boss' personal space.

Jon doesn't have any sense, the good kind or otherwise. He's much too preoccupied with staring at Martin like a lovesick idiot.

"Listen, if there's anything you need," Martin is saying. "If you want to talk—"

Jon nods dutifully.

Suddenly, there is a knock against the doorframe.

Martin breaks away first and whirls around. Jon follows his gaze to where Elias—or Magnus, whoever—stands expectantly in the doorway.

"I'm not interrupting, am I?"

"No," Martin blurts, eyes darting rapidly, anywhere but Jon.

"Martin had a question about a statement, but I've just finished answering it for him," Jon stumbles over an explanation. "Right, Martin?"

Martin nods enthusiastically and mumbles a farewell before ducking out of the office. Jon watches him go wistfully, his wrist oddly cold without the addition of Martin’s touch, his annoyance at Magnus’ appearance only sprouting thorns.

“I hate to bother you like this,” Magnus says, features twisted into a placid little smile that has Jon convinced that he does not, in fact, hate any part of this intrusion. “But I’d hoped for a word. In my office if that’s alright with you.”

Jon flattens out the beginnings of a frown, not sure what Magnus wants from him now, not sure how much he knows, not sure if this is a request Jon can say no to.

Jon realises, too late, that he should submerge the memories of his desperate scramble for the lever, Magnus’ threatening grip on his arm, and phantom bruises left behind, if only to tuck them away from Magnus’ reach. But now Jon is thinking of the clouded tunnels and Sasha’s scream and the walls of Maintenance washed red in the flash of lights blinking out warnings. You know how this ends.

Five more words that cling to Jon like a second skin. He does not want to admit that he’s scared they just might be true.

He faces Magnus, trying to be brave. “Of course.”

As Jon turns to leave, he spares one last longing look at his tea growing cold on the desk.

Jon has never liked the chairs in Magnus’ office—stiff leather things, angles not sculpted with the human skeleton in mind, much too expensive to be comfortable. Jon has a sneaking suspicion that Magnus’ choice in furniture is deliberate, intended to unnerve. If so, it’s certainly working. With Jonah Magnus, or his piercing eyes at least, seated across from him, Jon can’t help but feel like some helpless, squirming bacterium, prostrated on a glass slide beneath a looming microscope.

Jon wonders if this is what is was like for his own victims, the tortured strangers he stole statements from when he was freshly emerged from his comatose chrysalis, ravenous as all young things of nature are. Jon wishes it wasn’t so easy to draw comparisons between himself and Jonah Magnus.

“I sincerely appreciate you finding the time to sit down with me on such short notice,” Magnus says primly. “I know how busy you are lately.”

Jon blinks at him, subtly adjusting his position in his chair, in search of an arrangement of limbs that won’t make everything ache. “You do?”

“Naturally. I understand you’ve thrown yourself into restoring some sense of order to the Archives.”

“Oh, yes.” Jon suppresses a relieved sigh. “I’ve still so much to do.”

“And that brings us to the topic I originally wanted to discuss.” Magnus leans forward almost conspiratorially.

“Right.” Jon’s mouth is dry, his tongue grainy.

“I fear that you have internalised some misconceptions about your current situation, and I only wish to correct these immediately.”

“My current, uh, situation?”

Magnus gives him an earnest look, but Jon knows better than to fall for a softened chin and a deceptively forgiving expression. “I don’t want to lie to you, Jon. It’s only that I’m not certain how to present this delicately, but I have a responsibility, you understand.”

“I don’t think I follow.”

“This will be easier if you stop pretending for a moment,” Magnus advises.

“I’m not—”

“What do you remember of the Unknowing?”

So Magnus does know more than he is letting on.

Feeling petulant, Jon answers, “Can’t you just take a look inside my head and see for yourself?”

“Unfortunately, your memory is not at its most welcoming,” Magnus says. “And I think it’s best that you earn this revelation yourself.”

These are things you must discover on your own. Jon had still been learning what it meant to be the Archivist when Magnus first told him this. Even then, these words had singed him with frustration.

“Now, what do you remember?”

Jon pauses pensive. “I remember all of it, but most of it I don’t understand.”

“Tell me how it ended.”

“Basira managed her way out somehow. Daisy disappeared into the Buried. Tim—”

Magnus nods.

“Tim confronted Nikola. He had the detonator. I showed him it was there, right there in his hand. And he triggered the explosives.” It feels like a dream now that Jon says it aloud. So far removed from 29th July either way you look at it—eons ago, both past and future.

“You neglect to mention what happened to you, Jon,” Magnus reminds him.

“I—I was in a coma for a while. Without a heartbeat.”

Involuntarily, Jon recalls the thud of Martin’s chest against his palm, and clamps down on the memory before Magnus can snatch it up.

Magnus’ indecipherable gaze snags on Jon, and hovers there, one eyebrow lifted. “Was?”

“Yes, I was in a coma for six months.”

“And then, just like that, it was over?”

Jon frowns cautiously. “You know it wasn’t as simple as that. You made it so that I had my brush with the End and emerged less human for it.”

“Did you?” Magnus asks innocently.

“Did I what?” Jon’s impatience stings and itches across his skin like hives.

“Emerge?”

Jon forgets how to breathe for a few seconds.

“Tell me, Jon, what makes more sense? That you somehow miraculously woke from a six-month coma and became the arbiter of the apocalypse,” Magnus says. “Or that it was all a horrible nightmare with just enough survivor’s guilt in the mix to distort your perceptions of reality?”

“More importantly, which would you rather believe?”

Jon shakes his head adamantly. “Oliver Banks came to me with a choice, and I made it.”

Magnus tilts his chin to the side thoughtfully, not quite listening. “Then again, I suppose there’s always the possibility that you’re dead.”

Dead , that culminating syllable, strikes a cold blow between Jon’s temples. It rings there for a moment, tinnitus like the toll of church bells bouncing off of gravestones.

“I’m—I’m not dead,” Jon insists.

Magnus gives him a wry smile. “I can't let you perpetuate this delusion. Seeing you run around like this, living in memories and trying to make change where it won’t take root—it makes even me tired.”

“So this is all—what, a vivid hallucination?” Jon says this with cynicism, but that little flame of hope sputters dangerously. He is reminded of the vacant gap in his memory, the missing seconds before he first heard a kettle whistle from somewhere. He is all too aware of his headache, like a fireplace poker persistently driven through his forehead.

“You always did like Groundhog Day, ” Magnus points out.

Jon shifts in his chair, and his back twinges painfully, protesting. “But if this is all imaginary, how did I land here again? Why would I do this to myself?”

Magnus spreads his arms. “Why else? Retribution.”

Jon doesn’t try to refute this. Martin had told him many times, this is not your fault. Not once had Jon believed him, deep down.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I suppose you won’t take ‘out of the goodness of my heart’ as an answer, will you?”

“No.”

“I thought not.” Magnus sighs. “Truthfully, I wanted to show you that it’s no use putting up a fight. It would be easier for everyone involved if you just sat back and let time take its natural course because you can’t save anyone, Jon. I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that all your miniscule variations cancel each other out.”

It would hurt less, that’s for certain.

Jon’s arms drop from the flat, inhospitable edges of his armrests, his hands seeking refuge in his pockets.

“There are no second chances at destiny,” Magnus says. “And, really, I don’t think you’d like eternity very much. How many more loops will you stay sane for? Better to get this over with, don’t you agree?”

Jon is about to say, yes, I guess so. He’s about to nod and resign himself to the image of Martin sitting by his side in the hospital room right now, watching Jon’s limp, scarred form, his motionless chest.

But there is something in his pocket. First, there is something in his pocket and he must know what it is.

Against his fingertips, Jon feels rounded edges, metal that spirals. Martin’s advice echoes in his mind: focus on what feels real, find an anchor.

The thing in his pocket is a paper clip, the daily press of steel against his cheek, the first sensation that cuts through the numbness each time he wakes up. Jon clenches it tight in his fist, lets it dig into his fingers, more real with every burst of pain.

Jonah Magnus has had Jon marked thirteen times, but this paper clip has marked him a hundred, a thousand times more.

Jon's very own totem.

“This is real,” Jon says, his voice low.

Magnus gives him a pitying look. “You have always been too stubborn for your own good. I used to like that about you.”

He stands, straightening his collar. “Oh, well. You know me, Jon. I excel at improvisation.”

In a few purposeful strides, Magnus crosses the room, and his hand wraps around the doorknob. Jon sees the glint of something silver slip from his pocket, and before Jon can clumsily pull himself out of his chair, Magnus steps out of the office, closing the door with a flourish.

Jon scrambles to his feet, his grip on the paper clip loosened by his sweaty palms.

He hears the decisive click of a key turning, a lock sliding into place.

“Magnus?” he calls shakily.

“Jane Prentiss should be on her way up any moment now,” Magnus says and Jon can hear the cocky smirk superimposed over the words.

“Wait!”

But Jonah Magnus’ footsteps are already fading down the corridor, leaving Jon to wait for the worms.

Chapter Text

“Tim! Behind you!”

Besides the nights in the hospital waiting room, this has got to be his least favourite part.

Once again, Jon is stuck in document storage. Once again, he seems to be the only one who remembers the fact that this room is soundproofed (and that shouting ear-splitting warnings at the door, futilely hoping that they’ll reach Tim on the other side, will accomplish nothing but make the thunderstorm raging through Jon’s skull crackle more loudly).

Jon seems to be the only one who remembers, full stop.

“Screw this,” Sasha says through gritted teeth, and Jon can’t help but agree, can’t help but impulsively decide that when Sasha opens the door, Jon will follow.

Resolve flashing in her eyes, Sasha gives the doorknob a determined little twist, her hair streaking behind her like a comet’s tail as she darts through the doorway.

Jon drifts toward the door as it slams shut, drawn in by the residual gravity of Sasha’s decisiveness. Predictably, Martin reaches for his forearm, but Jon does not underestimate Martin’s ability to make him stay—whether by force or by that soft look in his eyes—so he dodges Martin’s grasp.

Martin’s outstretched fingers, not exactly falling short, find Jon’s hand instead. “Don’t,” he says.

Jon can’t quite look at him. “I’ll be right back for you,” he promises. “Stay here, okay? Please.”

“What? No, Jon—”

Jon tears his fingers away from Martin’s, and runs. Rage whets his fear, transforming it into something sharp, and Jon could follow Sasha and Tim, he could retrace his steps to Artefact Storage or Maintenance or the garage or Magnus’ office. He could walk right up to Prentiss and say, “Sure, let’s get it over with.” He could turn around and hold Martin’s hand for a few seconds more. But Jon has an objective, and that objective waits for him in the tunnels.

After navigating his way through the apocalypse, or at the very least traveling on foot from Scotland to London (which might as well be the same thing regardless), you would think that Jon couldn’t possibly end up lost in the Institute’s tunnels again. You would think wrong.

It takes him approximately twenty minutes to give up on the makeshift map, half scratched out on the back of his hand in pen. It takes him approximately another twenty minutes to lose hope of catching a glimpse of Jurgen Leitner ducking behind a wall as he arranges the winding maze of tunnels at his convenience.

The little notches in the stone walls, the imperfections, blur together until Jon can hardly remember which way means onward.

Still, he charges forward through the gloom, convinced that his steps will carry him toward the Panopticon. Toward the husk of Jonah Magnus, empty eye sockets, wrinkled, decaying skin and all.

Small clumps of worms trail at his heels, sluggish and weak, but Jon pays them no mind. It seems like only yesterday that the worms felt like the most terrifying adversary that Jon could face. Yet now that Jon trades blows with time itself, they seem pathetic by comparison.

Because it is time , and not Jonah Magnus, that Jon most desires to defeat. Only, Jon cannot kill time—not in the literal sense, at least.

Magnus, on the other hand—Jon has a bit more practice in that area.

But no amount of bloodlust can accomplish much with all these damn dead ends in the way. Jon nearly pauses to squeeze his eyes shut, narrow his focus to that one piercing pinpoint of sight, to simply know his way through the Institute’s underbelly. He almost dares to miss it, to miss himself as the Archivist, a craving so deep and sudden that his fingers tremble like they did the week after he’d thrown out all his cigarettes. Jon hates himself for it, making room for curled fists inside his pockets.

Jonah Magnus, Jon manages to remind himself. Jonah Magnus and his corpse.

The corridor widens abruptly, spilling out into a space just large enough to be a room of some sort. Jon takes a few steps forward and coughs. Dust weighs the air down here and Jon can’t help but feel like he’s suffocating on his own inhales. He raises an arm to shield his mouth and nose.

Jon squints, bracing against the darkness. He’s not sure how much of it is the natural dimness of the tunnels and how much are the shadows that cling to him like an impatient audience. Either way, Jon wishes he grabbed a torch.

The black settles into the recognisable outline of a chair, and a woman on the chair, head lolled to the side.

Jon backs up quickly, stumbling. Wrong corpse. Definitely the wrong corpse.

He kicks a frantic path through the worms that have filed into the room behind him, and flees aimlessly.

Somewhere, a kettle whistles.

Jon has taken to keeping the paper clip in his pocket, a small but noticeable weight against his thigh at all times, gleaming when he takes it out to run his fingers over it. A reminder.

And what is a paper clip, really? A spiral—a loop, unclosed. A loop that does not reach its natural end, does not return to its start. It just spins, spins, spins, and sort of…stops.

How much longer? Jon wonders because he doesn’t think that “forever” is the answer, and he doesn’t want it to be. 

“What’s that?” Tim asks, wiping his mouth on a napkin. “A paper clip?”

“Yeah,” Jon mumbles.

Tim leans forward across the table, unable to hear over David’s raucous laughter from the back of the restaurant.

“It is,” Jon says, louder this time.

Tim is quiet for a moment, and then gestures at Jon’s untouched bowl. “You’re not hungry?”

Jon shakes his head, watching his bibimbap grow cold. “Am I too stubborn, Tim?”

Tim raises a cautious eyebrow at him, setting down his spoon.

“What?” Jon says impatiently.

“Hold on, I’m trying to answer this in a way that won’t get me fired.”

“Tim.”

“Okay, fine,” Tim surrenders. “If you want to know the truth, you do have a tendency to get…stuck in your own ways.”

Jon must be making a sour face at him because Tim rolls his eyes. “Oh, come on. You asked. ”

“Like, you know that time you made Martin rewrite that report six times—”

“Seven,” Jon corrects.

“—seven times because he’d forgotten to add the case number to the top and you wanted him to figure it out for himself?”

Jon frowns. It was kind of a dick move.

“And you never ask for help when you need it. You act all uptight about doing it yourself, like with recording statements. It might be an only child thing, I don’t know,” Tim adds, shrugging.

“You’re psychoanalysing me now?” Jon asks, not accusing, but curious.

“Again, you asked.”

“Right,” Jon says. “Thank you for the honesty, Tim.”

“Anytime, boss.” Tim raps his knuckles against the table. “Hey, it’s not all bad. Do you know what optimists call being stubborn?”

This sounds suspiciously like the set up for a punchline, but Jon still asks, “What?”

Tim folds his arms across his chest. “Perseverance.”

Jon considers this. “Are you? An optimist?”

Tim tilts his head, amused. “Some days. You?”

Jon thinks of that little spark of hope that wavers and surges intermittently, thinks of the dense shadows that hang closer and closer. He thinks of the paper clip.

“When I remember to be,” Jon says.

Tim gives him an appraising look, grinning crookedly. “You’re weird today. I like that.”

Jon laughs, and his face feels like it's thawing. “Thank you.”

He knows he shouldn’t, but Jon borrows one of the field teams’ vans and drives to Hill Top Road, alone this time.

He doesn’t know what he’s looking for exactly. Really, he’s half expecting to find Annabelle waiting for him on the doorstep, ready to unveil how Jon has been playing into the Web’s master plan this whole time.

Instead, Jon finds nothing but cobwebs. Cobwebs and the faint smell of something burnt. This feels like the sickest joke of all, for the house at 105 Hill Top Road to be just that—a house.

Where’s the gap in reality, then? Where’s the inter-dimensional tear? Where’s the place where Jon can extend his fingers and brush other worlds?

Jon descends into the basement, hands and face sticky from the abandoned webs that still stretch from wall to wall, floor to ceiling.

Nothing.

The basement is empty and unimpressive, and terror scuttles on pinprick legs down Jon’s spine. Because before, there has always been a way out, a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency kind of escape that Jon hasn’t dared flesh out in his mind. Because if there is a rift, then there is another London on the other side, maybe one where Jon won’t always be too late, maybe one where the Magnus Institute doesn’t even exist, maybe one with another Martin. His Martin.

Now, there is only 29th July. Jon feels something in his chest splinter, scattering shards.

“What do you want from me?” he demands sharply. “What do you want?”

The house responds with cruel silence.

“Yeah,” Jon murmurs. “Didn’t think you’d have an answer.”

“What if Sasha comes back?”

From his seat on the cot, Jon tracks Martin back and forth across the document storage room as he paces, legs stiff, steps shuffling. He picks at a stray thread at his shoulder, near the seam that joins his left sleeve to the rest of the jumper. The way the fabric puckers beneath each anxious tug has Jon seriously concerned that the whole garment will unravel, falling to Martin’s feet in a shapeless tangle.

Something will unravel. Perhaps that something is Jon.

“It seems just like the sort of stupidly brave thing she’d do,” Martin rambles, voice trembling like a bonfire fighting on through a thunderstorm, always seconds from being extinguished. “I mean—I mean, you saw the way she ran after Tim.”

He glances at Jon, desperate.

Jon nods. “I did.”

Martin freezes. “Oh, God,” he breathes. “What if she doesn’t?”

“Doesn’t come back?”

Martin has resumed pacing, a blur of swinging limbs and nervous energy. Jon’s becoming quite dizzy just watching him.

“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Jon reassures him, trying for steady, confident authority. “You’ve got your corkscrew.”

Martin gives him an indignant look, mouth downturned defensively. It’s clear he’s taken Jon’s genuine comment as sarcasm.

“Well, it worked didn’t it?” he challenges. “And it’s not like we’ve got loads of tools to choose from. You can’t exactly run down to the hardware store and ask if they carry anything for worm extraction.”

“I know, Martin, and I’m—” Jon sighs. “I’m sorry. I should have listened. I should have prepared for something like this.”

Martin stares at him, caught off guard by the apology. “Yeah,” he says slowly, testing for boobytraps. “You should have.”

“And the corkscrew was quite clever,” Jon adds. “I’d never have thought of it.”

Martin drifts over to the cot, and sits hesitantly, leaving a respectable gap between the two of them. “Thanks,” he says, and Jon can tell he’s determined not to forgive Jon too quickly, but the flattered smile that wraps around his lips indicates otherwise.

Martin shifts and Jon feels the cot adjust to accommodate his redistributed weight, the subtle movement like gently lapping waves.

“Shit,” Martin whispers. “Do you think Tim—”

Jon knows Martin is about to leap up and start with the frenzied pacing again, so he places a hand on Martin’s wrist, anchoring him. “Tim will be fine with all the spare CO2 you stowed in there. Really, he’s probably better off than us.”

Martin nods, swallowing. “Right. Yeah, he’ll—he’ll be—”

He trails off, frowning as he scrutinises Jon’s face.

“What’s wrong?” Jon asks. Is he bleeding? He wipes at his chin with the back of his hand, but it comes away clean.

Martin leans back abruptly, the tips of his ears going red. “No, nothing serious,” he stammers. “That just sort of looks like the outline of a paper clip on your cheek.” He points.

“Oh.” Jon rubs at the imprint self-consciously, as if this will do anything to get rid of it. “There must have been one on my desk when I fell asleep, and it left a mark.”

Martin snorts, covers his mouth in horror, and lets out another breathy, muffled giggle.

Jon narrows his eyes. “Are you laughing at me?”

Martin tucks his face into his elbow and pretends to cough. “No, I would—I would never laugh at you,” he says, laughing.

“Good,” Jon says sternly. “Because this is a life or death scenario and it is very, very serious.”

In response, Martin hiccups.

And then Jon dissolves into delirious giggles, hardly coming up for air.

They both do.

Jon’s next loop does not end in side-splitting laughter.

There is, technically, some side-splitting involved, but certainly not the fun kind.

The kettle whistles and Jon walks the same routines, making his futile ripples, never escaping the feeling that he is square-pegged into 2016 (although he supposes this makes sense, what with all the circular holes being burrowed into him almost daily). More often now, more violently now, time catches him in a riptide, crashing into him where he’s weak in the knees, flushing his eyes with salt and wrinkling his fingers if he lingers too long. Recalling Martin’s advice, Martin’s thrumming heartbeat, Jon counts down from five during these tempests.

He always lands on one, tasting the same thing. Guilt.

Sometimes he considers going back to Hill Top Road, waiting in the basement until the spiders come.

Sometimes he wonders what Gertrude would do in his place. He doubts explosives or newspaper tips or sacrificing his archival assistants will solve this one.

Jon loses himself in maybes— maybe if the shelf didn’t break, maybe if he’d turned down Elias’ offer to be promoted, maybe if Jon had never moved to London, maybe if Jon had dismissed a certain picture book as too childish for his tastes.

Maybe if it had been someone else sitting behind his desk—Tim or Martin. Or Sasha.

“Martin said you wanted to see me, Jon?” Sasha is standing in the doorway, watching him with her specific brand of gentle curiosity. There’s a pencil tucked behind her ear, a vague kind of glaze to her eyes that Jon knows is a product of Sasha staring at her computer screen for too long.

“Yes,” Jon says. He pushes back his chair to stand, thinks better of it, and sinks down again. “Come in. Sit. Please.”

Sasha sits. Her gaze slides over the paper clip mark on Jon’s face, but she doesn’t comment on it. “Nothing serious, I hope?” she says lightly.

“No, I—” Jon pauses. “Honestly, I just really need someone I can talk to.”

“What’s on your mind? Does this have to do with the Ramao statement?”

Jon shakes his head. “This is more of a…personal matter.”

Sasha’s eyebrows shoot up. “What, like a romantic crisis or an existential one?”

Jon shrugs, at a loss. “Existential, I think?”

“Perfect, because you’d have to call Tim for the other kind,” Sasha says, propping her chin up on her hand. “I’m listening.”

Jon inhales, suddenly restless. “Do you believe that time travel is possible?” he asks.

Sasha nods enthusiastically, her chin wobbling atop her palm. “Sure. I’ve definitely seen odder things.”

“So you do think there’s a chance for someone to change the past if they were to go back in time?”

Sasha’s next response isn’t as automatic as her previous one. “Well, it depends who you’re asking. Are we talking the multiverse, dynamic timelines, block universe theory—"

“What’s that?”

Sasha straightens. “Block universe theory?”

Jon just nods, although he really meant, what are any of those things?

“It’s—we’re talking about spacetime,” Sasha explains. “Time as the fourth dimension.”

“Right,” Jon says slowly.

“So, since we, puny three-dimensional mortals, can’t conceptualise the fourth dimension, we perceive time just one moment at—well, at a time.” Sasha mimes something vaguely cube-shaped, which does little to aid in Jon’s comprehension. “When really, it’s already laid out in the fourth dimension—past, present, future, all existing at once.”

She looks up at Jon hopefully. “Do you get it?”

“Not really,” Jon admits.

Sasha sighs, and suddenly she’s leaning over Jon’s desk, rummaging through a drawer.

“Sasha, what are you—”

She lets out a triumphant sound, sitting back with a book and a pen clenched in her hands.

Jon watches, confused, as she uncaps the pen and draws a diagonal line across the outer edge of the book, staining yellowed pages with blue ink.

“That’s—that’s from the Library,” Jon protests half-heartedly.

Sasha ignores him. “Okay. This book is the fourth dimension.”

Jon eyes her cynically. “Sure.”

“Hush. This book is the fourth dimension, and you and I live here.” Sasha taps the plane where she’s drawn the diagonal line. “We perceive each page, each point on the line as an individual moment in time—seconds, minutes, hours, days. Let’s do days.”

“Mhm.”

Sasha opens the book slightly, holding one page between her thumb and forefinger. “This page, this dot on the line, is today. The next page is tomorrow. The next page is the day after and so on. But from where we sit, it looks like the following points, our future, only pop into existence at the flip of a page.” Sasha demonstrates, raising a handful of pages and letting them flutter downward, the line appearing in their wake. “We get to thinking that our three-dimensional lives can determine where the next point on the line sits.”

“I’m following so far,” Jon says.

“The problem is that the line already exists, always has.” Sasha traces it with her fingertip. “We just can’t see it from our limited point of view.”

She slides the book back across the desk, twirling the pen once around her fingers for what Jon assumes to be dramatic flair.

Christ, she’s such a nerd and Jon has missed her so much.

“So, you’re saying time is fixed,” he summarises.

Dread claws at his chest and, against his will, Jon remembers Magnus’ words. You know how this ends.

“According to this interpretation, yeah.” Sasha’s brow wrinkles suspiciously. “What’s this about anyway? What aren’t you telling me, Jon?”

Jon exhales shakily. 

“Let’s say you’re stuck in a time loop, and you’re trying to stop something bad from happening because it will result in something very bad down the line, and the reason you know this is because you’re from the future. Hypothetically,” Jon says in the space of one breath. “What would you do?”

“Hypothetically,” Sasha repeats.

“Hypothetically, how do I fix this?” Jon asks, his tone pleading. “Or I suppose I should ask, can I fix this?”

Sasha looks at him like she’s seeing him for the first time, her expression caught between awe and pity. She is silent for too long before finally covering Jon’s hand with hers, staring him down with a conviction that renders her eyes dark and deep as twin wells.

“It’s only one theory out of many more. And this is only paper.” Sasha indicates Jon’s vandalised library book. “Hypothetically, you’re a fucking time traveler, Jon. If anyone can rip it to shreds, it’s you.”

Rip it up. Jon thinks he just might.

Pro tip: it is much easier to convince your archival staff that you’re stuck in a time loop when you’ve already got one assistant on board—preferably if said assistant is known for being remarkably sane and a bit of a nerd about such things.

On average, once Sasha’s in on it, an hour or so of explanation (hold your questions for the end) is enough to have Martin and Tim nodding along.

On average, this is not the hard part. (Although sometimes Tim presses his lips together in a certain way when Sasha rants for a few minutes too many about Interstellar, and sometimes Martin gets this blank look in his eyes when Jon explains what it feels like to have worms tunneling their way through your skin, and Jon has to start all over again because he knows everything from then on will be nothing but the faint buzz of white noise to them, a waste of a loop.)

No, the hard part has always been coming up with a plan. And even with three more brains in the mix, this still seems to Jon like an insurmountable task.

At the very least, Sasha seems to know what she’s doing, or is at least pretending to. “I’ll need a chronological list of everything that happens, including the approximate times at when they happen. Anything you can remember,” she tells Jon.

Jon nods. “I think I can do that.” And he makes another list.

After one planning session, Jon—his hands planted on either side of a manic sketch of the Archives’ layout, complete with a dashed line meant to chart Prentiss’ whereabouts throughout the day—startles at a gentle nudge against his side. Sasha smiles at him kindly.

“We’ll help you figure this out, okay? Trust me.”

“Thank you, Sasha,” Jon says softly. “I didn’t know why I thought I could do this by myself.”

“Well, you do have a history of being rather stubborn.”

Jon smiles wryly. “So I’ve been told.”

Sasha hums thoughtfully.

“You would have made a much better Archivist than I,” Jon says without preamble.

Because it’s true, isn’t it? How many loops would it have taken Sasha to end this?

Sasha only shrugs. “I can be quite stubborn myself, you know.”

Jon thinks of Sasha’s screw this, the flare of unflinching determination in her eyes, the fine bones of her hand gone sharp when she reaches for the doorknob, Martin’s assertion of, It seems just like the sort of stupidly brave thing she’d do.

“Oh, I know,” he says.

“So, we’ve got the shelf collapsing at…” Sasha rifles through the sticky notes plastered all over Jon’s desk (most of them borrowed from Martin’s impressive collection). “Twelve thirty-two?”

“Give or take a few minutes,” Jon confirms.

Tim traces a finger over their timeline in blinding neon pink. “And Prentiss shows up outside document storage at one-oh-three?”

“Yeah, well, usually.”

“We can work with usually,” says Sasha.

Jon walks the perimeter of the room, trying to shake off the static-like jitter that electrifies his arteries, crushing shadows underfoot, as he takes a mental inventory of their supplies. Four torches, five padlocks, a dozen rolled up towels, nineteen tubes of super glue, and about as many fire extinguishers as they could find.

He falters. “Shouldn’t Martin be back by now?”

“He probably just had a hard time carrying it all to the lift,” Sasha says.

“Yeah, yeah,” Jon mutters under his breath, desperately trying to convince himself of this. “Probably just a small delay, nothing to worry about.”

He spins on his heel to face Sasha, wringing his hands. “Maybe I should go check on him. You know, just in case?”

Almost as if summoned, Martin comes crashing through the door, barely visible beneath a mound of crinkling yellow and plastic visors. When he speaks, his words are muffled. “Turns out, the Research department is ridiculously possessive of their hazmat suits. I hardly made it out of there with one suit, much less four.”

Martin shuffles forward, nearly tripping over the stash of fire extinguishers.

“Here, Martin,” Jon says, rushing over to help.

But beneath his unwieldy burden, Martin stumbles backward, off balance, and crashes into the wall behind him. And right into Jon’s flimsy shelf.

For one blissful second, Jon thinks that the impact won’t deal enough damage to compromise its structural integrity, but that moment is over all too quickly, when the shelf crumbles, books tumbling, files floating to the ground. Jon hears something splinter as the plasterboard fractures.

Jon studies Sasha’s grim expression, Tim’s faintly surprised frown.

Martin stands slowly, the hazmat suits in a heap at his feet. “Shit,” he whispers, eyes round with terror. “Shit, Jon. I’m so, so sorry.”

Jon spares a glance at the clock on the wall to his left. 12:26. A few minutes ahead of schedule. He can’t tell whether this is a good or bad omen.

“Don’t worry,” he tells Martin. “It was bound to happen eventually.”

Sasha hands him a hazmat suit. “Hurry. We haven’t got more than a few seconds before they start coming through the wall and we can’t waste too much of our CO2 in here.”

She is entirely preaching to the choir, as Jon has had many unpleasant experiences with those worm pioneers, the first to wriggle through the cracks in the drywall, and is not looking forward to another encounter with them.

“You don’t have a hair tie do you?” Sasha asks, pushing her curls away from her face as she struggles to fit her face shield into place.

“Yeah, hold on,” Jon says, yanking one of his desk drawers open. He shoves a box of staples aside, a few loose rubber bands, index cards. He finds the hair tie beneath a stack of blank tapes, and almost slams the drawer shut before a glint of steel catches his eye.

Jon pauses, digging through his scattered belongings to unearth a spiral, a loop, an anchor, a totem, a good luck charm. A paper clip. The paper clip. Jon must have absent-mindedly discarded it here this morning. Tore it from his pores and buried it beside highlighters and note-to-selfs in the wooden dark.

On instinct, Jon reaches for it, but his fingertips skim something else, cool, metallic by the feel of it. It gleams golden, and Jon picks it up, gliding his thumb over its intricate spider web design.

Can I have a cigarette? And suddenly Jon remembers that first loop, watching the flame bob, any closer and his eyelashes might have ignited.

“Jon!” Martin cries, strangled. “I think they’re getting through now!”

It feels important somehow, so Jon tucks the paper clip inside his right pocket, the lighter inside his left one.

He presses the hair tie into Sasha’s palm, cradles three fire extinguishers in his arms, and says, “Let’s go.”

Jon has devised a very simple, very efficient four-step procedure for staying ahead of the worms, and more significantly, keeping his friends whole.

Tim—currently wedging a chair beneath the doorknob, trying to secure the door to Jon’s office as it shudders beneath the tidal back and forth battering of Prentiss’ horde—is in the middle of Step One.

Over the squelch of worms, Jon hears the squeak of wooden legs against the floor as Martin drags Sasha’s desk over to barricade the door.

Step Two: Jon guides his shaking hands, pressing and folding, obscuring the gap beneath the door with one of the rolled up towels.

Sasha swears. “Bloody cap won’t come off.” The sleeves of her hazmat suit are too long, and lie limp and useless at her wrists.

Jon is at her side within the next second, dumping a handful of super glue tubes into her lap.

The door convulses again, and Tim rams his shoulder up against it.

Martin shoots Jon a panicked look.

At the edges of the room, more worms have begun to creep into Jon’s periphery.

Jon grabs wildly for a tube, tosses the cap aside, and squeezes, painting the floor in white. They have decided on a pattern of horizontal lines, but Jon can’t quite keep his hands steady and his lines quickly devolve into an erratic zig-zag. 

Sasha crumples her empty tube. “That should slow them down!” she shouts.

With Step Three complete, Jon signals at Tim and Martin. All that’s left now is Step Four.

“Run!” Jon calls.

Sasha is first to the stairwell, a smear of brilliant yellow in the haze of carbon dioxide gas. Jon, right at her heels, listens to the thud of Martin’s steps behind him, the clink of his fire extinguishers banging against each other with each swing of his arms.

Tim takes up the rear, slamming the stairwell door shut once he’s made it through. While Tim fiddles with the padlock, Jon pats his right pocket for the outline of the paper clip.

“Hurry,” Martin urges, bouncing anxiously from foot to foot.

“I’m trying ,” Tim hisses.

Jon watches the painstaking ascent of silver bodies, twining round the banister as they slither their way up from a lower floor. He swallows, and averts his gaze, knowing that he’s headed downstairs next.

The padlock clicks into place, and Tim rattles the door experimentally. “Okay,” he concludes. “That should hold.”

They all take a moment to catch their breath, and Jon allows himself a few seconds more, waiting for the rise and fall of his chest to slow. Maybe he’s in worse shape than he’d like to admit. Maybe he’s stalling.

“Be careful, Tim,” Jon says finally. “Remember to conserve your CO2.”

“Sure thing, boss.” Tim flashes his signature grin but it’s not as playfully crooked as usual. He’s scared, Jon realises.

“Don’t get yourself killed,” Sasha adds, knocking her shoulder against Tim’s. “And don’t do anything stupid.” She points an accusing finger in his face.

Tim brushes her hand aside, rolling his eyes fondly. “I think I can handle setting off a fire alarm,” he retorts.

“Meet us in Maintenance when you’re done,” Jon reminds him.

Tim nods. “Yeah, will do.”

Jon stares at him for a moment more, at the lean curve of his arm where it wraps around a fire extinguisher, the theatrics of his bright smile, almost convincing if not for his tense posture, like a spring coiled tight. And Jon wants to tell him not to go, wants to call the whole thing off, wants to say, well, let’s come back next loop and we’ll think of a better plan.

It’s selfish, he knows—to scrap all the hard work they’ve done today because Jon can’t bear losing Tim again. It’s illogical, he knows—to still feel all this grief when he’s lost Tim on hundreds, thousands of days like this. Most of all, it’s stupid—to think of it as losing , when Tim will walk into Jon’s office tomorrow at noon, babbling about Korean food.

It was always easier when it was only himself that Jon was forced to risk.

Still, someone’s got to do it. Someone has to make sure that the rest of the Institute’s staff evacuate before it’s too late.

Magnus’ words flap incessantly between his temples. You can’t save anyone, Jon.

Somewhere off to his left, Martin makes a sharp noise of disgust, and sprays the banister in two quick bursts.

Jon waves away the cloud of CO2.

Yes, I can, he thinks, defiant and blazingly stubborn. Yes, I can.

He turns to Tim, and croaks, “Good luck out there.”

Tim laughs, just fragile enough to make Jon worry, and shoots Jon double finger guns—although it doesn’t come across entirely suave now that he’s got a fire extinguisher tucked under each arm. “You too,” he says.

Jon watches him clamber up the stairs, CO2 swirling around his silhouette.

“Uh, Jon?” Martin says, his words pitching upward.

The door to the stairwell shakes on its hinges, the squirming drowning out the sound of Jon’s shallow breaths.

“Archivist,” Prentiss intones from the other side.

Jon looks to Sasha, her eyes wide and unblinking, and then to Martin, sweat beading on his forehead.

“Archivist, don’t you want to hear them sing for you?”

This time, Jon neglects steps two and three, and skips right to step four, taking the stairs two at a time.

By the time they burst out of the stairwell and into Maintenance, Jon’s face shield is fogged from the steam of his hot exhales, and he feels oddly light-headed—although he can’t determine whether all the adrenaline, the physical exertion of running in a hazmat suit and hefting three fire extinguishers, the anxiety, or his eternal time travel hangover is to blame.

Sasha asks, “Which way?”

And it takes Jon a good minute to remember which direction is left and which one’s right.

The paper clip. The paper clip. Jon fumbles for metal edges inside his pockets, but his fingertips are anesthetised. Jon reaches inside his other pocket. Cool steel grazes his knuckles. His right pocket. The paper clip is in his right pocket.

“Jon?”

He can hear the impatience in Sasha’s voice, like brambles.

“Right,” Jon says. “Go right.”

Martin watches him, forehead creased with concern, and this look on him is so familiar that Jon thinks he might cry or laugh or end up with some expression that’s a contorted combination of the two but isn’t done cooking, evolutionarily speaking.

An abrupt wailing pierces Jon’s ears and he winces. “You—you hear that too, right?”

The cries fall into a recognisable pattern. Rising and dipping like—

“The fire alarm,” Martin breathes.

“Oh, thank God,” Sasha says, a victorious grin splitting her face. “Tim did it.”

There is no room for relief, not for Jon. Not when he’s this close. “Come on,” he says.

They retrace Jon’s footsteps through the jungle of dangling wires, copper pipes. The lights seem dimmer than they were before, but Jon has a feeling that it’s just in his head.

“What kind of lever are we looking for again?” Martin asks. His voice echoes here, bouncing off the tunnel walls in a way that makes the hair on Jon’s arms stand on end.

“I mean, it’s the only lever down here,” Jon whispers, mildly annoyed. “Black and yellow stripes.”

Martin nods thoughtfully. “Right. That’s—that’s good to know.”

When Jon rounds the bend in the tunnel, he knows what to expect. He’s revised this part of the plan literally countless times, never sure how to build around the piece of the puzzle that is Jonah Magnus.

Jon knows he will be standing there, waiting with a complacent smirk and convenient lies budding on his tongue. In theory, Jon should be prepared for Jonah Magnus.

But when Jon rounds the bend in the tunnel, all he feels is tired, so tired. Jon is tired past the point of exhaustion, tired to the level where that weariness just sort of morphs into seething fury and Jon can’t really tell the difference between the two anymore.

“Hello, Jon. I can’t say I’m pleased to see you back, but I do like the new outfit.”

His eyes gleam emerald and his lips curl back from his teeth snidely.

And oh, is Jonah Magnus just begging to be smited.

“Get out of my way, Magnus,” Jon says through gritted teeth.

“I see you have your assistants with you,” Magnus observes. “I didn’t think you’d be one to give Gertrude’s methods a go, but I suppose there’s a first time for everything.”

Jon’s pulse pounds in time with the metronomic howls of the fire alarm.

“I’m assuming you’ve told them what will happen to them? What always happens to them?”

Panic skitters through Jon’s chest. It was the one thing he kept from them, loop after loop. The one burden of truth he refused to share, that he kept chained to his shoulders alone—Sasha standing over the table in Artefact Storage, pouring her final questions into the tape recorder, Tim delivering one last punchline with his thumb on the detonator, Martin, mist-cloaked and tear-streaked with Jon’s blood on his hands.

“Don’t listen to him,” Jon orders, glancing over his shoulder.

Sasha gives him an almost imperceptible nod and Martin shrinks back slightly.

“I have to give her credit. Gertrude had the right idea,” Magnus says and Jon wishes he would stop fucking smiling. “Everyone grows out of loyalty eventually, Jon.”

“Get out of my way,” Jon repeats, his words like broken glass.

Sasha, slowly inching forward, is closer to the lever than Jon by now. Jon hears the crinkle of Martin’s hazmat suit as he drifts over to Jon’s left.

Magnus’ penetrating eyes follow every movement, his attention split neatly between the three of them. He turns to Martin. “Really, I can’t imagine what made you trust him in the first place. All this talk of a time loop and evil worms and the apocalypse when last week you couldn’t say the word spooky in his Archive without earning a stern lecture.”

Martin’s gaze flicks to Jon. There is doubt there, nestled in the folds of fear, unless Jon is just imagining it. Please let him be imagining it.

“And Sasha, his right hand. Aren’t you curious about what fate awaits you in the original timeline? I mean, you can’t possibly believe that he’s told you everything? ”

Sasha’s chin juts out, obstinate.

“You know,” Jon speaks up, the quake in his voice subsiding. “You tried so hard to convince me that time can’t be changed, that I was dreaming or dead and too stubborn to see it, but I don’t think you’ve ever managed to convince yourself. Why else would you be here if you were so sure that the future you want is inevitable?”

Magnus’ smug grin plunges, his eyes gone cold and glittery as jewels.

“And I am stubborn, lethally so, but I recognise a fatal flaw when I see one,” Jon tells him, making sure Magnus’ eyes are locked on him and him alone. “It might have taken me a few loops to figure it out, but you’re predictable, Magnus.”

Magnus scoffs, but when Jon doesn’t react to this show of apathy, his gemstone eyes grow wide.

Look at me, look at me, look at me. Jon repeats this silent command, as he has been doing since they rounded that bend in the tunnel, always the bait.

“You’re stalling,” Magnus realises, too late.

Jon cocks his head and smiles. “Well-spotted.”

There is the nausea-inducing sound of metal hitting a hard skull and Magnus crumples to the ground, unconscious.

Behind him, still brandishing a fire extinguisher, is Tim, who has discarded his hazmat suit and shoes in the name of stealth, and is wearing the grin that Jon knows and loves, in all its crooked glory.

They had stumbled upon the blueprints for the maintenance tunnels by accident, and it had been Martin who had pointed it out: “It connects there. It’s all one big loop.”

Sasha had suggested that Tim sneak up on Magnus from behind.

It had been Jon who had proposed the bit with the fire extinguisher.

“Did I get him?”

Jon nods, pride flaring in his ribcage. “You got him.”

Now, there is room for relief and Jon’s exhaustion morphs back into just that—exhaustion. Only, there is still more to be done.

Sasha sprints for the lever, fingers wrapping around the handle. She hesitates, glancing at Jon. “Did you want to…”

He approaches and grabs hold of it too. “Ready?” he asks.

Sasha smiles at him from behind her face shield. “Ready.”

Together, they pull.

Jon listens for the hiss of CO2, waits for the thick clouds to be expelled from the vents above their heads.

He waits one minute, then two.

“Does it usually take this long?” Martin wonders. If he were not wearing his hazmat suit, Jon knows Martin would be tugging at the loose thread on his jumper right about now.

Sasha drops her hand from the lever, but Jon tugs it back up and down again.

Nothing happens.

Jon hears the telltale squelch of the worms, coming from all sides. They can’t be more than a few meters down the tunnel.

“He must have dismantled the fire suppression system,” Tim says, muffled.

Sasha says something optimistic, Martin places a soothing hand on Jon’s shoulder, but it’s all white noise, all static, all whistling, screaming, wailing. Kettles and fire alarms and sounds in the background to be ignored.

Because Jon knows how this ends. He didn’t want to, but he knows. After all, somewhere deep in the marrow of his bones he was always the Archivist. So, he always Knew.

It’s already laid out in the fourth dimension—past, present, future, all existing at once.

Yes, with the capital letter, he Knew. With all his power, with all these mistakes catalogued in his memory, Jon still is not even an imprint on the face of time. With all his lists, his plans, his promises, his worn-down, patched-up, underdog positivity, Jon is still not enough.

Somewhere, a spider is laughing. You think your paper clip can save you now?

Jon pauses, deliberating. Can it? Can it save him? Can it serve as not just an anchor, but a life jacket as well, buoying him up above the murky depths?

Jon’s fingers tingle, waking up from an unplumbed slumber of despair, and strain for his pocket.

But it is not the paper clip that he finds in his pocket. Jon’s fingers brush golden webs. With a soft flick, Jon watches the lighter spew forth a burst of flames, that sparking glimmer of hope from his very first loop.

The shadows buckle and flee.

His blood set alight, Jon’s eyes shoot upward, scanning for—there! A small, white bulb attached to the ceiling. If Magnus only messed with the lever, and not the fire suppression system itself, then there’s still a chance for Jon to end this.

Jon whirls, motioning toward Tim and Martin. “I’ve got to reach that smoke detector. Help me up.”

Tim raises an eyebrow, but joins hands with Martin to give Jon a leg up. Jon wedges one foot between their palms, and stands, steadying himself as his fingers dig into Martin’s shoulder. With his free hand, Jon raises the lighter to the smoke detector and flicks once.

His hands are slippery with sweat and it doesn’t catch.

“Come on, come on, come on,” he mutters.

Jon flicks again, and fire licks upward, blurring the air near the ceiling. The smoke detector begins to blare and it is the most beautiful sound Jon has ever heard, second only to the knowledge of Martin’s heartbeat.

“Archivist? You can’t run forever,” Prentiss’ words tumble against the walls, much too close for comfort.

Jon leaps down, stamping out a crowd of worms as his feet hit the ground.

As his vision begins to haze over, the outlines of his assistants lost to the rolling clouds of carbon dioxide gas, Jon hears Sasha’s voice carve its way toward him.

“I told you,” she says. “I told you that you’d rip it up.”

Jon laughs, never more glad than now to hear Sasha chime in with I told you so, never more glad to be proven wrong.

The worms are screaming. They’re screaming, and Jon thinks that this too is a beautiful sound.

Somewhere, a kettle whistles.

There is a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, wool both ragged and soft against his arms. Jon blinks blearily, letting his strangely bright surroundings come into focus.

With a flash of clarity, all of Jon’s 29th Julys come flooding back and he rakes his fingers across his face, feeling for the paper clip that isn’t there.

In the background, volume low, a monotonous National Geographic sort of voice drones on. Arachnids of the order Opiliones are more commonly known as harvestmen or daddy longlegs. Jon recognises the script. It’s from that documentary Martin had made him sit through, insisting on exposure therapy.

Martin.

Jon tries to stand, wrestling with the blanket, but finding himself only sinking deeper into plush cushions.

“Whoa, easy!” Suddenly, Martin is at his side, setting down a steaming mug on the coffee table. He smells like tea leaves and home and Jon can’t imagine how he ever needed the paper clip to remember what was real.

“Are you alright?” Martin kneels and lifts a hand to Jon’s forehead, feeling for his temperature.

“Yeah, I was just—” Jon swallows. “Bad dream?” he finishes feebly.

Martin tucks a strand of hair behind Jon’s ear and spares a guilty look at the telly. “Not because of the spiders, I hope?”

“No, no, not that,” Jon assures him. He gawks at the back of his own hand, cradled in the fabric of the blanket. No scars. “I can hardly remember it now.”

Martin smiles at him, relieved. “Good.”

Jon can’t help but lean forward and press a kiss to the side of his mouth.

Martin laughs, fluttery and safe. “What was that for?”

“I’m trying to bribe you into changing the channel.”

Martin rolls his eyes, “Jon, we are not watching the one on Sumerian bartering again. ”

“It’s better than spiders,” Jon says petulantly.

Martins sighs, settling back against the couch, one arm tucked around Jon. He retorts with something about the ecosystem and biodiversity and Jon counters with a comment about the genesis of trade. They fall back into the rhythm of light bickering, just because.

And Jon thinks of loops—not the kind that tear you from now and stitch you, threads loose and jagged, into then, but the natural kind. A familiar pattern to a conversation, a pair of arms that fit around him just as he remembered, a look he knows so well that he could wear it himself. Loops in the sense of that snug feeling of laces tied tight, belted and secure. Loops in the sense of him and Martin, their own special brand of inevitability.

Loops in the sense of Martin’s fingers curled around his—at the end of the world, at the beginning, and, Jon supposes, at all the times in between.