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English
Series:
Part 2 of the ferry docks
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Published:
2025-03-04
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3,515
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1/1
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45
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the traveller

Summary:

After the apocalypse, Jon awakes to an intact world, with a Martin who is wrong. Over and over again.

Notes:

Hello! This is a sequel to "The Ferryman", which is basically this in reverse (Martin universe hopping to find Jon.) Please give that one a read first if you so wish, but please don't feel you must. Thanks!

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Jon finds him on the second floor of an antiques shop.

The antiques are, of course, different to the ones he is familiar with. The markings on the bottoms of sugar dishes are a decade or two out, the faces on tear-edged posters unfamiliar, the metals with their mixed-up chemical compositions shine a slightly different colour. The him he awoke into hadn’t much interest in history, so he has little context for these changes. Jonathan Sims the traveller - meticulous and obsessive and spoilt by the bittersweet indulges of The Eye - curses Jonathan Sims the host. Jonathan Sims the host cowers in the corner of his own mind, it seems he cannot escape his cowardice, and asks quaveringly how the hell he got in here.

The stairs had been difficult. Stairs are always difficult, and this is something he comforts himself with. Whether the sky is orange, or snow falls sideways, or nobody ever invented music, if there are stairs, they are difficult, and this means that Jonathan Sims still exists. If there is rain, his shoulder twinges and if there are gloves, he covers his burned hand and if there are spiders, they scream about wanting more until he realises it is him that is screaming. He thinks that he is relieved that he remains himself, even as his molecules are rearranged in the fog. At least then, no other poor soul must carry that burden.

He thinks he is relieved.

He thinks.

Martin stands eight feet away, frowning at the price tag on a tarnished carriage clock.

Tick, tick, tick.

He looks like himself this time, soft in the places that Jon feels he ought to be. He’s almost wearing the right clothes. The suit he’d worn in world sixteen had made look severe and boxy and the clearly begrudging sportswear of world seven hung off him like a costume for a different doll. The worst was the military garb of world twenty-one, which matched Jon’s own, and made him look two decades younger.

Still not quite right here though. The frames of his glasses are too thin, and his jumper is made of coarse wool that he’d finally admitted in Scotland just isn’t worth it for the cosy aesthetic. There, I said it. It just itches. Jon sees mottled redness around the neckline and his heart squeezes around scar tissue.

He doesn’t think he makes any sort of noise, but Martin looks up, and meets his eyes with an absent frown. The lack of recognition isn’t a sharp pain that steals his breath anymore, but his chest still aches.

The swiftness of the fog this time is perhaps a kindness, but he’d hoped for a little time, even if this was still the wrong one. It had been quite a while since he’d been afforded any.

It is to be a little longer.

The Ferryman arrives and steals him away and whispers the clock is rather fitting, don’t you think?

***

He thinks of purgatory, early on.

His childhood – the first, that is – hadn’t been particularly religious. But a rosary had been among the things his grandmother had shoved into his scrabbling hands in an attempt to please for the love of god Jonathan, calm down before closing the bedroom door behind her. He had knocked those beads together and he had not calmed down, but he had at least begun to think about questions bigger than is tonight the night I get eaten. Guilt is his familiar pastor, of course, the only one he needs, and he speaks to it through the grille of the confessional, and it says, yes, yes Jon. Of course it is all your fault. That way, it is in your control.

So naturally it feels like purgatory, dragging his broken body through universe after universe, through failure after failure, through miss after miss. Even after it all, the entities who laugh in the face of such ideas as gods, he and his guilt tangle that rosary around their fingers once again and count the worlds as beads. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen…

He considers also, briefly, that he might be in hell. His own personal hell, destined to hope over and over again, only for it to be snatched from him in a swirling fog that tastes different to the Lonely but has very much the same outcome. It’s a sign of stupidity, he supposes, to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome. He always was so precious about people thinking him stupid. This fate would not be any crueller than he deserves, but he hates the idea of cruelty wearing Martin’s face.

A voice, not the Ferryman, tells him that this is not correct.

You just need to find him, it whispers.

Jon balls his hand into a fist and swallows.  

I thought you were gone, he whispers back.

You just need to find him, it repeats.

He nods, a small thing.

He always was the Eye’s favourite.

***

So he travels.

He is a teacher here and a librarian there, a pianist once, a botanist another and always, always Martin is there.

In world nine, he is a chef and world eleven he is a gardener. In world twenty-two he is in publishing and in world twenty-nine the monarchy has fallen and in world thirty everyone lives underground. In world twelve they share a drunken kiss under a streetlamp and in world fifty-one they are neighbours who tap morse code messages across their adjoining wall. In world forty-four they make it work, until it falls apart, and Jon is so relieved when the fog closes in that he wakes in world forty-five sobbing.

Something that astonishes him is how many worlds Martin is kind in. Really, on balance of probability, that bitter, petty streak that runs through him like a nerve should break through the skin and strangle his kindness, at least sometimes. After all, few of the worlds breed kindness. Thirteen has a tropical storm brings wartime rationing back, twenty-four has world leaders make some questionable decisions about identity in the eyes of the law and forty is simply crueller, in a way that Jon cannot put his finger on. In all of these, whatever other traits are tacked on, kindness is what prevails.

Astonishing.

Jon is not quite sure how to situate himself in it all.

His monstrous progression had been a simple matter of a metaphor turned literal. He had been no stranger to accusations of inhumanity by the time they started being levied in earnest. Between his grandmother’s pointed bedtime stories abut changelings and the playground jibes of bullies and Georgie’s cheap, red-eyed shots, he wore the accusations in their new concrete form like an ugly but well-fitting coat.

He is unsure now, of the state of that coat.

The Eye silenced after its parting gift and his body certainly feels punishingly human. He has to sleep against the terror that he’ll unwillingly hunt and eat against the conviction that food is no longer for him. But still, he feels a monster, stalking through innocent realities and leaving bony footprints in his wake. How can he possibly be human again?

How?

In world 54, Martin cuts his finger on a potato peeler, and Jon cries chokingly like he’s drowning in the blood, and thinks -

Ah.

That’s how.

***

Tim’s there, frequently.

Jon wonders what calls him back. There are a million different far more plausible scenarios in which Tim ends up miles away from him – in the penthouse office of a high-flying publisher, or floating down the Amazon in a canoe, or flat on his back in a German nightclub, cackling like a hyena. But in so many worlds, he’s there to some degree, in Jon’s fragile sphere of influence. Sometimes he is solid and stoic and sometimes he is breezy and languid. Sometimes he is a coiled spring and sometimes he has already snapped. Sometimes he sees him once, sometimes ten times, sometimes he is a voice on the breeze that he knows is close.

Jon cannot work out what keeps bringing him near. It’s nothing to do with Danny, he lives or dies or does not exist at all with the same consistency as whether England is called England or bluebirds know how to sing; none. He tortures himself with the possibility that it might be him, trapping him once more. Twice more. Ten times more. That he might have some cosmic magnetism that draws him in, beyond the metrics of probability and coincidence and frankly, edging instead towards mockery.

World 47 is the worst.

In world 47, Tim is his best friend.

It is not something he deserves, and it is not something he asks for. When he corners the Jon of that world and grabs it by the lapels, slamming it against the wall of his mind and demanding its statement, memories of a begrudging co-habitation at university take root. He sees an awkward half-wave across the threshold of assigned accommodation, both younger and more wiry. He sees Tim shuffle into his bedroom at two in the morning to report that the freezer has defrosted itself. He sees them both kneeling, bleary-eyed with tea-towels and poking miserably at soggy fish-fingers. He sees them staring at the orange glow of the oven, salvageable nuggets stacked three-storeys high, and hears a juvenile piggish snort – unclear from whom – at the absurdity of the situation. He hears them dissolve into delirious giggles.

Stop it.

Run.

Tim didn’t run. In world 47, he does heartbreaking things like show Jon how to play Zelda, and pay for his chips at the pub, and distract him with awful renditions of Wham songs when his leg flares up. In return, Jon does indefensible things like give Tim his bed when he needs to crash for a night, and take him to A&E when he goes over on his ankle, and listen to him rant about Danny’s bad habits without even pleading be thankful Tim, be so so thankful for him –

One afternoon, they get lunch together in a small café opposite the train station. Jon orders first, the last cheese panini, and Tim kicks him lightly on the back of the calf.

“Dickhead,” he says quietly, out of earshot of the cashier. “I wanted that.”

“How unfortunate. I appear to have left my psychic powers in my other coat,” Jon replies with flat, scar-tissue levity. “My sincerest of apologies.”

“It’s alright,” Tim says. And with a twinkle in his eye like he somehow, impossibly knows he says, “I forgive you.”

A barista called Martin asks if he’s okay while he vomits into the café toilet and he laughs high and hysterical.

“No. No, I don’t think I am at all.”

***

World 62, Martin is a paramedic.

“You’re pretty tough you know,” he says, after popping Jon’s shoulder back into its socket and receiving the barest of flinches, “For a wisp of a thing.”

Jon smiles flatly.

“I’m not tough. Calcified, maybe.”

***

His parents are still dead, in the vast majority of worlds.

It’s disconcerting that his grief appears to be something of a fixed point, robust enough to withstand across universes. He tries not to think about what this might mean for whatever universal significance he might hold. Instead, he reminds himself of his own metric, that if he is in pain, he is Jonathan Sims, and swallows the sandpaper knowledge that he can never, will never, save them.

There are exceptions though.

In world 33, he and his mother, along with the last straggling remains of the human population, shuffle across the bombed-out wasteland of the United Kingdom. It is a world of bare trees and dust beneath feet, stifling air and brick-pile monuments, oppressive silences and piercing screams. Jon supposes he should find it familiar. He does not.

He is reminded, in this world, of quite how young he actually is, travelling with his mother as her child. He has no real way of checking whether he stopped aging after the Unknowing, but feels in his bones that he does now – either way, he can be no older than early thirties at absolute most. He feels the weight of each absent year as he tucks himself into his mother’s side and closes his eyes against dry, whipping wind.  

He has never really been somebody’s child before. He has been somebody’s responsibility, somebody’s charge, somebody’s burden. But he has never been somebody to be hummed to in the dark, he has never been somebody to have his hair carded through with gentle fingers, he has never been somebody given the last scrap of food with pleading eyes that say take it, dear one. Take it.

He pushes it back.

Of course he does.

In this world, he does not recognise his mother. He thinks, in a flash of panic, of the Stranger, that it may have snatched her away and replaced her but no, that isn’t it. Her face is the same as the thumb-worn polaroids he left behind in his first world. The two freckles beside her eye, the worn down left canine, the bump on the ridge of her nose. It is simply that he cannot reconcile himself with her in three dimensions. He finds himself wanting to ask her to stay still. Maybe if she did, he might be able to get his head around the impossibility of her presence.

Desperate as he is to find some sense in his bleak travels, he considers why she was allowed to live this time. The only conclusion he can arrive at is that perhaps if the net-pain of the particular world is high enough, he is spared some of his own. This doesn’t work in practice. His pain expands to fill its vessel, and when he finds Martin in this world, he feels grief as sharply as he did when he was four years old.

It is in a refuge tent. The bags under Martin’s eyes are great purple bruises and he has a limp to match Jon’s. His clothes hang off him and his bones creak when he rises from the log he’d been using as a chair.

“Welcome,” he says, in a voice warm despite it all, “I’d offer you tea, but it…”

Doesn’t exist anymore.

They stay in the tent for a week. Jon and Martin sweep the floor side by side, and smile at each other through downcast eyelashes, and make shadow puppets like children on the canvas wall. They play noughts and crosses in the dirt, and bicker about the lyrics to half-remembered songs and dare to watch the stars for a moment. And Jon experiences something miraculous.

“You’re getting on very well with Martin,” his mother whispers, while Martin fetches water. “Should I be searching the rubble for a new hat?”

“Muuum,” Jon whines, burying his face in his hands, and it slips out so naturally that he has to bite down on a sob as she playfully jabs his ribs.

His feelings when the fog arrives, to the hellscape where his mum smiles impish and alive, have never been so complicated.

***

In world eighty-nine, the sky falls in.

It has been raining for weeks, almost non-stop. The building ought to have been condemned years ago, but was saved by a selfish love of antiquity harboured by faceless suited entities high-up. An authentic Victorian theatre with gas lamps lining the walls and red velvets hanging from the balconies. The seats are ornately carved, dark wood – there is something clerical about their shine, something straight-backed and confessional. The ceiling is spotted with painted stars.

Jon dares to make a wish as they fall.

There they go, the chaos radiating from Sirius’s epicentre and sprawling into dying galaxies. By some miracle, the first stars fall in the middle aisle and those that are able jump out of the way – some over and onto those who are not able. And then the scramble begins as the rapture continues, the water coming down in an onslaught, a barrage, a vast and legitimate flood. It is cold and solid and heavy heavy heavy, fragments of ceiling manning the deadly tsunami in a vertical armada. The shrieks and the screams and the rushing water, the relentless, physics-defying waves that surge in the wrong direction. The blood that begins to streak the carpets and the pews, the bodies that fall and the hands that grasp. The sodden skirts and the children slung onto shoulders, the ushers who know they should be the last out, the ones that are, the ones that run. The handbags floating in debris, the ice-creams abandoned, the programmes soaked, the birthdays ruined. The roof that continues to fall away in pieces, the dust and the ash, the decaying history, the gas-lamps shattered, the velvets sodden and ruined.

Martin is there, in the central aisle, rigid like a totem pole and staring vacantly, like he’s waiting for something. With the closest thing to bravery he’s ever achieved, Jon makes a break for him, towards the chaos.

He plants his hands on his shoulders, and says firmly, “It’s okay, you’re okay, but we need to get outside.”

Martin’s dazed eyes meet his, then sharpen into focus, and a bemused frown settles itself in the centre of his forehead. Jon tightens his grip.

“I’ve got you.”

And I hope that’s a good thing.

They weave their way through the collapsing right wing and into a catacomb of corridors. Jon keeps waiting for a yellow door to appear, or for right turns to stop making sense, or for a shrieking laugh to pierce through the fabric of his escape. It doesn’t. They aren’t here.

“Nearly out. It’s okay.” 

The air cools, and there is a sudden swelling of sound. A thousand voices grow near, beyond the fluorescent green of the fire escape. Jon feels Martin reach up and paw at his hand, firm on his shoulder. He cannot bring himself to let go. Selfishly, unforgivably, he wraps his calloused fingers around Martin’s and shushes him. Miraculously, Martin does not pull away.

Jon drags him across the carpark. They weave carefully, between ambulances and crying people, between shock blankets abandoned and people sitting cross legged on the floor, staring. Between debris and cameras and people with notebooks, clipboards, screens. They weave until there is no more weaving to be done, until they are on the fringes.

Martin staggers against a tree, releases Jon’s hand. Flattens two palms against the rough bark. Breathes. Shivers. Breathes.

“Safe now,” Jon says, like that means anything. “Safe now.”

“Thank you,” Martin gasps.

“Something apocalyptic about it isn’t there?” Jon says, allowing himself the privilege of hysteria. “The stars falling.”

“You of all people would know,” Martin says breathily to the tree trunk.

Every cell in Jon’s built and rebuilt body freezes.

“What did you say?”

A beat.

“Nothing.”

“No.” Jon takes Martin by the shoulders and turns him around so that his back is against the tree. He cannot breathe. He needs Martin to answer so that he can breathe again. “Tell me, why me of all people?”

“Just that…”

Martin looks at him.

Martin looks at him.

The Archivist nudges him closer. 

“Martin?”

“…Jon?”

Jon’s knees buckle as he lets out a hundred sounds at once. Hysteria, disbelief, triumph, tragedy, astonishment. Martin catches him, but turns to jelly too. The two of them sink, as Martin mutters, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god…”

He buries his hands in Jon’s hair. Jon burrows his nose into the crook of Martin’s collarbone. He heaves in a breath, submerging his forehead in damp fabric and dampening it further with overwhelmed tears.

“Oh Christ,” Jon exhales, with an enormous crack at the syllable break.

His next utterance cascades towards it, and gushes foaming and desperate through the gap.

“I’ve found you.”

“Wait…” Martin mumbles into his hair. He feels a vigorous shake of the head. “No no no, I’ve found you.”

Jon is silent. And then he begins to laugh, although it really isn’t funny.

“Oh Christ,” he repeats.

***

In world eighty-nine, Jon wants the tabby cat, but Martin prefers the tortoiseshell. They take both.

In world eighty-nine, they begrudgingly sign on the ground-floor flat, because while the skylight was lovely on the top floor, lifts aren’t things to be trusted. Especially not in the long term.

In world eighty-nine, they dream, both of them, of lives lived in and died in and left. They remain dreams, with the quality of unreality, and melt away at the bleary emergence from the duvet.

In world eighty-nine, Martin screams you made me kill you, and Jon screams I had no choice and Martin screams there’s always a choice, and it’s true, but it’s complicated, and Jon cannot find the words to argue.

In world eighty-nine, Jon whispers, “My mum liked you,” in a way that does not sound like it needs an answer.

In world eighty-nine, the ferry docks.

In world eighty-nine, they die when they are supposed to.

And when they are supposed to is -

Eventually.

Quietly.

Together.

Notes:

A comment would make my heart sing and soar!

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