#serensnippets

Jet looks up from his meditation. “Yes, Juno?”

“It appears that one of our escape pods is jammed. Could you show me how to fix it?”

“Of course, Steel,” Jet says. He pauses and pulls himself to his feet.

Then he hurls a fist toward Juno’s face.

Juno ducks. Too quickly.

oh boy do i! 

referenced piece is this one, in which martin stops jon from reading the statement. he reads it first and gets angry. the beholding does not take it well. picks up from where the snippets left off, so the first few paragraphs might look familiar.

–

“Made you the Archive,” Martinsnaps, and oh, there is the fury Jon had seen in his face before. “WhenPrentiss attacked, Jon, Elias knew about the CO2 the whole time. He had his hand on therelease, and you know what he did? Do you know what he did, Jon? Hewaited.” 

“Waited—” 

“And then the—with Melanie, with Daisy,that was all on purpose, Jon, he wanted you marked.” Martin laughs, adisgusted and furious thing. “Your palm, you didn’t cut it on your own, didyou? That was Michael. And your hand, that was Jude, and the Dark Sun, that waswhat you were doing with Basira in Ny-Alesund, wasn’t it? And then, and then,all he needed was the Lonely.” His laugh this time is loud and bitter. “All heneeded was me.” 

“I don’t understand.”

“This would have ended the world,”Martin says, and slams the paper onto the cushion between them. “He would havespoken through you, Jon. Summoned them here. All of them.”

And all at once he can hear it. Risingfrom the parchment, the sibilant hiss of a voice that sounds almost likeElias’s and nearly like his, smug, reading words he should not know. Theurge to Know floods through him, and suddenly it’s not Martin holding thestatement, but simply a man, a person, a human with stories to tell, and itwould be so easy to rip him apart. The Archivist knows him so well,knows all of this man’s weak points, and after his brush with the Lonely thereare so many. Spurred by the hiss of the voice and the burning in the back ofhis mind, a savage glee, Jon stands. All over his body, eyes open like ripplingcoral, in waves.

“Jon?”

He has to know. He has to Know. It’s soclose. He’s so close to understanding it, understanding all of it—theworld that they’re in, Magnus’s plan, why he was chosen, why he was made—andit wouldn’t take much, not really. In the face of all the despair and fearalready festering within him, what is one more man flayed open?

“Jon? What’s wrong?”

His childhood friends, who were notfriends, not really. His mother, who hated nothing more than his face. Jon, theArchivist, who has hurt him so many times. There are a dozen ways he could tearthis man apart, and there is a distant salivating glee in selecting the rightknife. The Archivist opens his mouth, vaguely aware that the eyes on his face arebeginning to glow, and Looks—and looks—

“Jon,” the man says again, and thewords are not fearful, as they should be, but soft. There’s a hand on hischeek, and suddenly the Archivist is aware that he is crying. The touch is likea brand and he shudders, starts—stares—

“Martin,” he breathes. There’s ablissful moment of incomprehension—he’d been looking through his own memoriesof Martin for references to…his mother? Then it strikes him all at once whathe’d almost done. What he’d meant to do.

Nausea rises up in him so powerfullythat he retches. God, he’d almost—he stumbles back, away, he has to getaway from Martin and that—there is still the knowledge that he couldtear it from Martin after tearing Martin apart and Jon knows it would be so, soeasy to do so.

“You should be afraid,” Jon tells him,and only when his voice breaks does he realize he’s laughing. He leans againstthe arm of their couch, shaking. “Martin, why aren’t you afraid of me? Whyaren’t you afraid?”

“I am,” Martin says, then instantlylooks horrified, clapping a hand over his mouth.

It sure has! :DDD Fittingly enough, “love” shows up five times so far!!

--

None of that word yet, so instead we’ll do rage:

“You were crying, Martin.”

--

She’d meant to go home. This is one of her few free evenings, and she really does need to sleep — she needs to be mentally sharper at the beginning of a new chase, typically, than the end — and she is in fact on her way there, prowling by foot to let her body decompress, when she hears it. 

Hears — no. It is not a smell, or rather it is not just a smell. It is a faint static that buzzes along the top of her skin, like the most thrilling of all of her chases. It is the faint taste of electricity and paper in her mouth. It is the prickling of the hairs along the back of her neck that tell her she is being watched. 

It is a monster, prowling the streets of London, just as she does.

She turns off the main streets without thinking, following the not-smell down a series of back alleys. It’s unusual, in a way that gets her blood pumping so hard she struggles to hear any sounds that aren’t static; during most of the Hunts, the scent doesn’t leave a little trail of paper folded eyes that she can smell through, pinning down her prey with precision. She doesn’t need to consult her map, electronic or mental, at all. She turns down a street, and then another, and then finds herself by the river in a quieter part of town, the water slow-moving and infinitely crueller than the cold air surrounding the two of them. Here, her breath mists in the air. 

There is only one other beast on the street. It’s a thin, gangling thing, poising well as a human. There are streaks of gray in its hair, catching the dim light from the streetlamps edging the river, and quietly, to herself, Daisy smiles.

She catches up to it easily. “Sir?” she asks, affecting the sweet wide-eyed innocence of a tourist. It’s one of her favorite guises. In her pocket is her favorite knife, and she’s glad she finished a Hunt today, so that she would have it still on hand. “Could you point me toward, ah, Engleshire Road?” 

The thing whips around, and a dozen eyes open all along his neck in surprise. They all flash with something like recognition. It’s all the proof Daisy needs — it knows her, and she does not know it. Monster. 

“Good Lord,” it breathes, staring at her, and Daisy lets her grin stretch wider, feral. 

“You reek,” she says, following it smoothly as it backs away from her. It’s headed toward the river. She’d really rather it not fall in. No fun watching some beast drown. “I don’t know when you got here, but it’s lucky I’m the one that found you, really. Most of the others like to take their time.” 

“I know,” the monster says, its voice shaking. “Trust me, I.... Hm. I didn’t think you’d find me so quickly.”

“Oh?” She raises an eyebrow. Lets her hand fall to her side, just enough for the streetlight to glint off the blade. “You knew I was coming, then?” 

It hesitates. The dozens of eyes on its neck have closed again, hurriedly, so the gaze that falls to the blade comes from its face, and Daisy almost wants to pout. It was unnerving in the best sort of way. All those eyes. She wonders if they’ll stay open once the monster itself is dead. 

“Eventually,” it says, in the soft sort of voice she’d call a murmur on a human. 

“Prepare me a nice dinner, did you?”