JON, OF COURSE, IT’S STILL JON,
each word is a punch to the gut, and jon thinks it may be easier if that were literal, if he were left bleeding at the edges of the institute in any way but metaphorical. he’s certainly earned it by now. what does it say about jon that he’s grown so accustomed to violence he’d prefer it over an honest heart-to-heart? is it better or worse if he cannot tell whether this is a new development, or if he has always been so incapable of such vulnerability?
it isn’t as if he can leave. so each syllable lands its blow and he stares firmly at the ground and breathes shaky smoke and lends no assistance to beholding. this isn’t meant for the eye.
( he looks up, sharply, only once. my jon. it’s as much a comfort as it is a wound: the implied past-tense, that tim’s jon no longer exists and never will again.
it aches more than he’d expected it to, and he cannot meet tim’s eyes for more than a moment. he catches the very start of tim’s achingly false smile and his gaze drops. )
suddenly, tim is silent, and the void his words leave as they hang in the air is unfathomably vast, waiting for jon to fall in and never resurface. there’d be no coming back from that. but there’s already no going back, isn’t there: he can no more erase the wrongs he’s done than move forward with them unaddressed, and he’s stuck tightroping over this canyon between sentences, equally fearful of speaking and staying silent.
he does speak. he has to. his full weight leans against the brick behind him; his unoccupied hand presses at his eyes, as if it alone could quell the emotion threatening to flood out of him. not now, he begs it.
‘ i know, ’ he says, because he’s apologized too many times and the words i’m sorry mean very little by now. ‘ i’ll admit i’ve … i’ve had the same thoughts, about one of us being replaced. whether i would know. whether i did know, with her, with sasha — i look back and i think perhaps that’s why i was so damn paranoid, that maybe i knew something was wrong and couldn’t place what until i found the tapes of her voice. ’
he shakes his head, the wryest of unhappy laughs escaping smokefilled into the air. ‘ i know that’s just … hindsight, wishful thinking, what have you. wanting to give some reasonable cause to the way i acted, rather than it being — what it was. unreasonable, unwarranted, unfair. to — to you, especially, i know. ’
his cigarette’s nearly burnt out already. have they really been talking for so long? he stamps it out on the wall behind him, drops the end on the ground; of all his sins, littering is fairly low on the list of importance, by now. ‘ i was … i was afraid. i still am — god, i’m terrified all the time, but i should’ve seen that you were, too. ’ his words are trembling in time with his hands. at least he can shove one shaking piece of him into his coatpockets, hide them from view.
‘ i know it might be easier if i’d been replaced as well. something simple to blame, at least. but … i’m still here, tim. christ, i’m still … ‘your jon;’ if you’d let me be, of course. the — the good thing, about me not being replaced by some eldritch thing, is that … i’d like to think i’m still capable of change? of being better — at the very least, someone you can stomach being around. i know that’s an incredibly low bar, but … it’s a start, isn’t it? ’ god, it has to be. he needs it to be something.
THEY’RE THE AFTERMATH OF A BATTLEGROUND, A BOMBSITE; all ruins piled high and ashes still smouldering, bloody and riddled with shrapnel. for all the steps they’re finally taking, pulling themselves ragged but breathing to the surface, they’re still half-crushed beneath rubble and despite how he wants to, tim doesn’t know how to begin digging their way out without bringing it down around them both.
where once there’d been a cruel, stomachsick satisfaction to every blow his cold words and brutal disregard could land against jon’s attempts at defence or apology, the tremor in jon’s words now leaves tim queasy. stubborn as jonathan sims can be, there’s no fight left in him here. jon takes every hit, flinches but doesn’t move from the crosshairs --- scarred and burned, exhausted and scared, any instinct of self-preservation has been beaten from his bones, and it makes tim ache to see him recoil, only to keep reaching out anyway.
how did they get here ? even so clearly as tim can map each slight, each breakdown in communication, all the fear and all the paranoia that has left them standing here at ceasefire with a minefield between them ... he can’t make it fit any better than the feeble notion that perhaps jon was never himself. all of it just desperate fabrication, to say he doesn’t recognise jon anymore, to say their pieces are too shattered, too broken to put back together.
they’re all jagged edges now, with so long spent sharpening themselves into weapons, corkscrews to try and dig the other out from so deep under their skin --- what possible difference could slicing their fingers on the glass trying to rebuild even make to hurt them now, with hands as bloody as they are ?
( it’s deceptively simple a thought when it clarifies in his mind, as if it’d always been there, waiting for the smoke and dust to clear, for the haze of fear and senseless anger adrenaline to fade: why on earth should he keep fighting this ? how, in any battle on hell or earth, could jon ever be his enemy ? )
so tim finally says, ‘ i miss you, too. ’ and offers another of the thousand things he swore he’d never let himself say, lets the atlas-weight of it from his shoulders, and pulls his hands from his coat pockets, breathing the last lingering tendrils of cigarette smoke warming the chilled air between them.
if the world were kinder, neater, more satisfying in how it ties up loose ends and lends itself to conclusions, the admission might be accompanied with tears, with a kiss or a scream. there would be catharsis and the aches would fade, and the pieces would slot back into place ...
but things are rarely so easy; his words stay quiet, the night air stays cold, and the distance stays between them, jon’s back to the wall and tim standing in the dim yellow-orange of the streetlight. it’s a painful reality that as surely as the knife hurt going in, there is equally no gentle way to pull it out --- but, still, it has to come out.
‘ i just-- i don’t know where we go from here ... i don’t know where i fit into any of this, jon. i can’t keep-- ’ eyes skitter back to the open grave of the institute, fire-door a casket swung wide, waiting for them to step back inside and swallow them whole. tim’s skin crawls and the choking fear threatens again, he looks to jon instead.
‘ i want to be okay again, but i don’t know how, not here ... ’