#neutronbutt

“Would you like a cup of tea?”  Mike asks, sensing his predicament. He doesn’t hold the kettle, only his cup. There is no kettle in the room. Jon wonders if he can even see out of the caved-in side. 

Jon lets out a breath, “I’m-I’m good, thank you.”

“Are you sure?” Mike says immediately. There wasn’t a pause between Jon’s reply. The conversation is not the same as before, but it’s fast forwarding to its conclusion. He waits, watching back, ready for Jon to continue their charade. 

“…yes.”

“-It’s good-“

“-I’d like your statement-“

“-How rude. I was only offering-“

“-Just make me fall already,” Jon snaps. 

The expected response doesn’t come. Mike, still holding his cup, just stares. A trail of blood runs down his forehead, sliding past his cheek, and flows slowly ever downward until it settles on his chin. His smile quirks. 

“You want to fall?” Mike asks incredulously. His voice is muffled, heavy, like someone added a grainy filter after running a marathon. He lifts the cup to his lips, the first time, Jon realizes, but he’s too busy watching the blood on his chin. The trickle pools at the point, slowly growing from a small dot to a fat teardrop. It trembles, waiting, growing, but not falling just yet. 

Mike lets out a satisfied sigh, apparently finished with his sip. He places the cup on the table. Jon’s gaze darts to it. He’s not surprised when he sees that it’s filled to the brim with dirt stains and gravel.

He wonders, vaguely, if the Buried felt remotely similar to being buried alive. If the lack of intent to keep you alive makes the suffocation any less brutal, the fear any less real. Or if the Buried just didn’t want to share with the End, and the two fears simply reveled in Mike’s fear hand in hand in his last suffocating moments. Perhaps, they got nothing at all, Mike too far gone already from the blow. 

“So you’re ready to fall?” The dirt makes Mike’s voice hoarse. He’s spitting gravel out now. His tongue flicks a rock in Jon’s direction, landing in his cup with a soft pang. The man’s smile is rotten with mud, but it doesn’t stop it from twitching fully. And still, the blood still hangs, waiting just waiting-

Jon meets Mike’s gaze. The playful green is dulled to something almost black. As much as he’s looking in his direction, Jon doesn’t think he can actually see. Still, Jon leans back in his chair and tries to meet the dead gaze the best he can. “No,” he admits, and he doesn’t know how you can sound tired in a dream, but the resignation in his voice is far too blatant to be blamed on anything but exhaustion. His eyes land on the dirt stained cup. “But I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” 

“We all make-”

“-Choices.” Choices, his choices. Choices for others. His life is full of choices. “Yes, I’ve heard it before.” 

That smile twitches again; a rock falls to the ground. “Not that they matter much. Tell me, how much has killing me changed things?”

Jon presses his lips together. He could tell him that no, that wasn’t him; Daisy did that. He could also assert that while he didn’t particularly affect Jon, there are now several lives free from the Vast avatar’s hunger. He could even say there’s one less ‘gentleman’ in the world. 

But he doesn’t say these things. These things do not matter to the Falling Titan, and ‘change’ is only relative to scale. 

No, nothing has changed as far as the Vast is concerned. 

“I thought as much,” Mike says, with at one point would have been a laugh, but sounds more like a cough. 

Mud covers every inch of the previously pristine cup. Jon should feel cornered, buried like Mike, but the room is blurring, the air around him anything but that warm, damp stillness. His head is light, his heart thumps wildly, and he has to resist the temptation to grip the chair like it would do anything to help him. He asked for this, literally, but the memories of his breath being taken away by endless winds fight with the logical inevitability of the moment. He doesn’t panic, but that doesn’t stop him from trembling in his seat.  

Mike’s dead gaze goes sharp. For a moment, nothing breathes. No wind. No sound. Just, knowing. The eye before the storm. It’s only broken by the drop of blood. Finally reaching its limits, it lets go, falling, falling downward to the buried cup… 

Mike’s smile finally breaks, and he breathes easy. “Have fun, Archivist.”

The drop of blood hits the cup, and the floor is gone. 

(Here’s the thing about dreams. They’re exaggerations. No matter how level-headed and real a dream could be, there’s something hyper realistic about it that emphasizes some sort of feeling in your life, even if that feeling is just a deep sense of boredom. A focus, a pinpoint, a moment to read the little details until it doesn’t feel real anymore. Dreams represent the psyche in a way that always speak the ‘truth’, even if that truth is an irrational lie we believe with every fiber of our being. 

It’s no wonder the Beholding uses it as a weapon. The subconscious is an easy way to deliver fears in a way that’s inescapably yours. Trapped under the microscope built on your own memories, the Eye can focus, swivel, and simply watch the way the human imagination can twist its own fear until it squirms helplessly under the subconscious power of its own truth. 

The Archivist is its lens. The Archivist knows just how to focus the right way to see the worst of every possible moment until it’s fine tuned to Know. 

The Archivist is the hyper-real. 

So no, Naomi didn’t fall fully into that grave, but dreams cheat and of course, it’s far more satisfying to claw your way out for all eternity than to escape. The professor sits with squirting hearts, sadly only a slight exaggeration. But the way Tessa eats the plastic bits of the keyboard is such an improvement over simply watching her tremble from another doing it. Awake, the Archivist is not an abomination of endless eyes, but with the way he watches and wants to know, his gaze might as well be thousands and at night, it is. 

They are exaggerations, but interesting ones, showing truths that feel real, even if they’re technically fake. This is how dreams feed the Beholding. Watching, Knowing fear in its most primal form.

The Archivist is a lens. He watches for the Beholding, and in turn, it knows. But the Eye has a doorway to his mind now, and despite being its servant, he hasn’t been feeding it well. The Archivist oh so wants to be human, to pretend he has a place among those he should feed upon. If the Archivist wants to be human so badly, then he should allow himself to be watched, known. 

The Archivist has fears of his own, and tonight, the Eye will drink in every bit of it. And dreams, they’re exaggerations, and in order to compensate for the lack of watching tonight, the Eye will make sure the Archivist feels his fragile human fears in the most raw form imaginable. The Archivist does not know how to understand his own emotions, others or his own, but tonight, he will be forced to face his own fear with a cruel, unrelenting quality to it, in a way where it keeps wrapping around until it’s both truth and lie. 

Tonight, the Archivist will suffer, and he will be watched.) 

Jon feels like he’s falling.  

But he’s not. 

Falling implies he’s going anywhere. But he’s not. He can’t be. Despite the fact he can see things moving beyond him, they feel like they exist in a place that’s not Mike’s apartment or even a place that’s real. Because the apartment is gone, the chair long disappeared, and Jon’s just falling, but not actually falling because it feels the same way as if he’s in a chair, caught in a whirlwind, but trapped by something keeping him from escaping it. 

The Fears don’t care for technicalities, even less so in dreams, so while Jon is technically not falling, his stomach’s dropped and the bile rises, only to be shoved down by the way his heart kicks everything into place. The air buffets cruelly around him to create constant walls of bruising pain. It shoves whatever air he has left out of his lungs, but when he breathes he feels choked by the sudden influx of wind that make them feel like they’re about to explode. 

He tried to scream when this started. He could tell he tried to make a sound from the way it tickled his throat. But the moment he opened his mouth, the rising terror was forced back and was choked down to his stomach by the gutting winds.

He can’t feel. He can’t move. He can barely think. His voice is long gone to the winds. And yet, a cruel part of him has complete clarity of all of this. Each bruise created from the terrible winds. The acidic taste of bile on his tongue. The carnal part of him that tells him ‘he’s going to die’ despite knowing he’s technically not in state where he can. It notes, it analyzes, and it tells him to look beyond the air. 

And he does. And apparently it’s his choice, for all that’s worth. 

In the distance he sees people. Familiar people, but not the ones he usually sees in his nightmares. They move slowly, languid, and if they’re speaking, well, Jon can’t hear his own thoughts, let alone their words.

But he sees Tim mid-laugh. Watches him, as he transforms into something sharp and bitter. His face looks cracked. 

He sees Basira, expression hard, but she looks beyond him. She’s seeing something more important than his pain. 

Daisy stands too far beyond her, but her face is…wrong. Too sharp, too ready, and he sees her grip on her knife slowly get tighter. 

He does not see Melanie or Georgie. But a figure he doesn’t recognize smiles sadly at him, and that bothers him than any hate he could see from her. 

Farthest away, barely a blur, Martin stands alone. Jon tries to watch to get more than a glimpse, but he’s gone before he can even miss him. 

But he’s only the first. 

Jon wants to reach out. To move, do something other than be stuck in this whirlwind. But he’s moving his arm, and it feels like something is pushing it down from all sides. The air cocoons it, pressing down even as Jon uses all his strength to reach out and try to do something. But he can’t. 

He can only watch as the wind takes them too. 

They may be frozen in this distortion of time, but the winds strike with an uncaring grace. The mystery woman is first, then Tim quickly after. In the split seconds before they’re gone, terror and satisfaction fill them respectively, but for the time spent on their faces, they might as well not have existed. 

Daisy’s form blinks. Gone, but back in a heartbeat. 

But Basira and Daisy blink away a second later. Together, but gone. 

Martin’s form blinks. For a moment, he’s there, just the two of them, and he could just maybe-

But Martin turns away, and if it’s the wind or the fog that takes him, he’ll never know. 

And Jon’s hand is barely raised an inch. 

He wants to scream again, but he knows it will be meaningless. The endless wind would just take it away from him, and even if it didn’t, what’s the point? The void beyond him would just swallow it whole. 

He’s saved the world, Jon thinks in that brief bit of clarity. That should matter. Things he does should matter. But everyone is gone. And those who aren’t gone will be soon. He’s the Archivist, a monster, and monsters can’t escape things as human as death.

The wind swirls and swirls. He feels the loss of everyone, but nothing changes here. Jon is still raising his hand to do something. He doesn’t know what. He blinks and a thousand stagnant worlds blur ahead of him. They’re not his, a part of him screams, but if he can do anything, anything, it would be worth it.  

He raises his hand for eternity. The winds never stop. His skin is made of bruises, and his heart has made everything else stop. He can not scream, and does not want to. The terror in what will happen if he doesn’t take every thought into moving his hand is far more pressing. 

Jon reaches through the wind. For a brief moment, a wonderful blessed heartbeat, he touches the ground, and he feels dust on his fingers. 

And then he’s thrust back into the whirlwind. The ground he touched flies away, gone before Jon could even see the patterns he made. He settles back into the same falling position as before, stomach dropping, bruising winds, pounding hearts, the works. 

His fingers are spotless. 

The world isn’t silent, it can’t be, but the wind is just white noise at this point anyway, and Jon is empty. He tries to think. He tries to figure out what he’s feeling. He tries to understand and feel dust. 

But all he does is fall. 

When Jon finally wakes up in his chair in the Archives, he’ll be shaking. He’ll grit his teeth, and glare into the piles of statements around him, glare flickering into more hungry for a second, before turning back into anger. He won’t be able to place exactly why he’s terrified, only feeling cold and empty, wanting something to fill that space where his scream was forced to hide. 

But he always knows why he’s afraid. 

In a world of monsters, and Powers beyond your understanding, it’s easy to fall into existential terror about your own existence. Keeping themselves alive become the most important priority, and as more complications arise, ‘to hell with everyone else’ brings a delicious amount of terror for their gods to revel in. 

Then of course, your life has to have meaning if you protect it so feverishly. Every life you take, every step towards monsterhood, and every second you build a world of horror should lead to something. To make every bit of pain and suffering worth it, right? To make something of a world that doesn’t otherwise care for your existence, right? 

Life is worth it, right?

Jon will remember his spotless fingers and will wonder-