At least the axe is one of us
Summary: Stuck in limbo in a world that is not his own, Jon observes the people of the OIAR and tries in vain to warn them of what is to come. Author's notes: Originally posted to ao3 (ToneDeafBard7) on 6/8/24.
Time passed.
How and how much, Jon didn’t know. It was different from the coma, floating among crystal-clear faces of those who hated him, those he’d brought there. The Eye had closed, sucked backwards into the empty socket it once occupied until it was too faint for Jon to sense. When the line had been cut, he’d felt it as surely as a broken leg. The sky was screaming, and someone was laughing, and in that last instant Jon could See the lines in the sky, those millions and millions of webs tangled around every inch of their world. He felt them brush against him, almost teasingly, before there was a rush of static and a final-sounding snap and Jon and Martin were no longer there.
He was somewhere, though he didn’t much feel like figuring it out. It was as if someone had placed a sheet of frosted glass between his memories and his mind; he could make out the shape, but everything past that dissolved into a sea of color and shadow.
He felt himself pulled along by an unknown current, lifted away from himself and into some place that was, for the first time in god knows how long, quiet. Uncrowded by screams, or the racing thoughts of a restless mind beside him. It was quiet, and Jon’s mind felt fuzzy, blurred at the edges, bits drifted off and slipping away.
He slept, and he bled.
Sometimes there were people, and with those people came voices, except the faces and the voices did not always match. None of them were real, perhaps the only thing they had in common. He saw them flash by as he fell. Nothing more than snapshots, every one of them unfamiliar. It was hard to think, in whatever in-between place he was, and whenever he managed to open his eyes for more than a few seconds he could see the webs, hanging from a ceiling that did not exist as he fell through a space that did not end.
When it did end, it happened suddenly. The feeling was akin to slamming chest first into the ground, except for the fact Jon didn't seem to have a physical form, let alone a chest.
He could not feel, but he could See again.
Part of him began to despair at the knowledge that after everything, the Eye still clung to him.
The rest was grateful, and he hated every second.
The IT man could sense them, Jon knew, and it was with this man he placed his hopes of communication. It was difficult to control the places he watched from. More often than not, he felt rushed from microphone to microphone, pulled by the ebb and flow of an invisible crowd pressing around him.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t have time.
Doing things purposefully, he soon learned, didn’t work. It was more of a subconscious thing. When he had enough of a mind to think about wanting something, that want was useless unless he found a way to pluck the strings in such ways that they worked to his advantage.
The first time he heard Martin’s voice again, he would have cried if he’d had a face to do so with. His voice was staticy and distorted but it was Martin, his Martin. Jon let himself float in the nothingness and listened.
The names meant nothing to him. It was an email of some sort, sent to a friend by someone who believed they had seen some sort of evil spirit. But Martin went on to lament about love and loss and loneliness and Jon nearly broke all over again.
If Martin had found a way, that meant it was possible. Later that week, Jon managed to push his own voice through the speakers, praying that the borrowed words would say what he could not.
You trusted me. I lied to you. I’m sorry.
He spoke to the IT man—Colin, as he’d learned from countless hours of nothing but listening and waiting. (It wasn’t as if he could do anything else.) Colin was stubborn, paranoid, and overcautious. A dangerous combo, but he was Jon’s best option of warning the rest of the staff.
Maybe someone on the outside could save them. Save Martin. Jon was getting what was owed to him, but Martin had never deserved this.
Jon started small. Nothing so obvious as to scare him away, or so he’d hoped. One of the tamer statements(if any could be called tame), about something beneath the waves spotted from a cruise ship.
It backfired. Colin, who in hindsight must have known there was no text-to-speech on such an ancient computer, was instantly on guard. Jon’s second attempt only served to worsen things, and by the end of the week his only progress had been to convince Colin the computers were actively malevolent, which was only 1/3 true.
It would have been smart to stop. Still, Jon couldn’t bring himself to give up. The rest of the staff were oblivious; Alice, the only other person who might have listened, had already demonstrated an impressive ability to ignore things she didn’t want to see. Colin could sense him, no matter how much he misunderstood. Maybe next time he’d understand.
Listen to me. Please. Please, I know you see me. Listen to me.
Gwendolyn Bouchard was a puzzling person.
She put him mind of a younger Jon, a Jon he didn't much like. Aggressive, overbearing, constantly eager to prove herself. She mimicked Lena the way Jon had once mimicked Elias, back when he was thrown into a position he hadn't been ready for and chosen a rather unfortunate person to copy. She took her job far too seriously, took far too much overtime, and berated her coworkers far too much.
The difference was that back then, Jon had no idea what he wanted. He'd been offered a position and taken it, only to realize he was woefully unqualified. Magnus had preyed on Jon's desire to prove himself, Jon now saw. Jon had been applying for promotions for nearly a year, given he was one of the most experienced people in research. The turnover rate at the Institute wasn't quite as high as it was at the OIAR, but it certainly wasn't low; in the four years he'd worked there before the promotion, Jon had quickly become one of the senior researchers.
And he'd been good at it, too. Unlike archiving, Jon knew for a fact that he was a damn good study. He'd been gunning for a research position since finishing uni and ended up at the Institute. It was meant to be a temporary thing—he certainly hadn't intended to devote his life to chasing down imaginary ghosts. But he'd stuck around, and he'd tried to climb the ladder, only for Elias to throw some roadblock or another in his way. David had worked there longer, no matter that his research was a mess and Jon was constantly the one catching his careless errors. He'd be a better choice for Head of Research. Maybe next time. Oh, and someone needed to sort the cold projects that were being delivered to the Archives. Could Jon help with that, and bring Sasha if it turned out to be a two-person project?
It was infuriating to see how much of his life had been planned. Manipulated. Elias had seen he was Marked, and used Jon's ambition to put him in a position where he'd take any job that was offered to him, qualified or no.
Gwen took that story and turned it on its head, throwing herself headfirst into the fire. She thought she knew what she was getting into. (She did not. Not the things that really mattered.) She believed she deserved this. She feared, above all else, that she was not good enough, and to combat that she threw herself into her job with a restless fury.
When he first heard the name Bouchard, Jon's blood had run cold. (Not that he had blood anymore, but that was what it felt like.) A million scenarios had run through his mind; perhaps he'd misjudged the third person trapped within these systems. Perhaps something had happened to Jonah, the way Jon suspected it had to Gertrude, and he was once again free to roam the world and try to bring about its end. Perhaps his and Martin's sacrifice had been in vain, and they would be doomed to watch the death of another universe without being able to so much as speak.
But Gwen did not feel the way Elias had, all clinical and observant and wrong. Her professionalism was a carefully curated front, and beneath it all she was still very young.
Gwen had a purpose, but it wasn't the right purpose for her. Jon hoped she realized that before she was too far in.
He tried to talk with her in what ways he could, but Gwen seemed to hear only what she expected to. She filed each spoken case diligently and professionally, noting them down but completely missing the point.
For peace of mind, Jon kept tabs on her uncle. It was difficult; moving from screen to screen within the OIAR was difficult in itself. Trying to move outside the place was like trying to walk through a tornado. Not only that, but he'd have to find the address, as well... It was bound to be a whole new mess, and probably a great way to get himself killed(if he was even capable of dying like this, though Jon was not inclined to find out).
It took him a month, in the end. He jumped into Gwen's phone, only for the information whizzing through him to slip in and out of his mind was if he was trying to hold water in his hands. Remembering the address, then pairing the address with the contact, made Jon feel as if his brain had been put through a meat grinder.
He got the address, but paid for it with a long period of listlessly floating in space, unable to do anything but be swept along by the current. He wasn't sure how many days went by like that, though when he got back he heard Alice remark on the lack of Chester's voice as of late.
The address was far. Getting there was a long and agonizing process. Jon skipped from web to web, bouncing through street cameras and phones and baby monitors. Half the time he wasn't sure he was even going the right direction.
But things became almost easier as he progressed, as if he were adapting to it. It was... okay, it did not seem like a good sign, all things considered, but it made things a bit easier, so Jon wasn't going to question it. Yet.
When he finally made it to Elias Bouchard's flat, it was almost a disappointment to see his fears had not been realized; the man at the desk, halfway through what looked to be a budgeting report and halfway through the absurdly potent joint perched in his mouth, was decidedly himself.
He tried to spy on Lena, a few times.
From the moment Jon laid eyes on her, he’d known she was wrong. There was an aura to her, one that didn’t match any he’d seen before. It was murky, as if someone had thrown the Fears into a blender and spat out some strangely altered thing.
She seemed human, at least on the surface. She didn’t sprout claws or fangs when alone in her office, just ran through paperwork and fired off emails. Her straight-as-a-pencil posture never wavered, and her face rarely faltered from one of bored disinterest.
Despite that, something about her was just…. Off.
Slipping through the webbing that led to her computer was no more difficult than it was anywhere else. It always gave Jon a strange feeling, as if he were balancing on a tightrope, despite the fact that he didn’t even have a body to fall with if he were to slip. He could hear her typing, skimming through the information that was racing through Jon’s mind like the pages of a flipbook.
Lena’s office was a simple place, barren of the posh sort of decorations Magnus had enjoyed. Aside from a dusty bookshelf on one wall, stuffed to the brim with old volumes, it was practically barren. She kept her desk sparse and neat, the files within each drawer neatly stacked and organized. The emptiness was almost suffocating.
What was Lena’s angle, in this situation? Better yet, what was she?
Jon lurked in the cameras as Lena went over her records. It was painful, existing as he did. Every moment was occupied either by an awful, mind-rending pain or an overwhelming flow of information poured directly into his mind.
It was startlingly familiar to the feeling after he’d killed Jonah. That torturous elation he’d experienced then, even with his intent to destroy it all, had stuck with him. Perhaps that was why he found it easier to tune out. Separate his mind into pieces, the way he’d done while traveling across the domains with Martin, and leave the bad bits for later.
Still, Jon figured that whatever was happening in this place, Lena’s computer was the best place to find out. It was hard to hold onto memories, especially those of the files that passed through his mind. Most appeared for a few seconds with all the subtlety of a peal of thunder, then darted away and left him reeling all over again.
If he could just hold onto a couple of them… Well, you never knew. Maybe Jon would get lucky and it would be just what he was looking for. The universe had to owe him a bit of luck at some point.
It was difficult. There were so many words being thrust at him, and Jon felt as if he were drowning as he tried to absorb them all. It wasn’t like being Archivist, when another being’s words flowed from his lips. That had felt… not natural, but right, somehow, as if it was what he was meant to do. This felt as if the words were being pulled through him, threaded roughly with a needle and thread and yanked out the other side. They grated against his thoughts as if they were chicken wire, each moment of successful concentration matched by a failure in which he found himself overcome.
Still. Jon had pushed through it plenty of times before, searching for cases with the words he needed Martin to hear from him. He’d remembered the ones Martin gave him in return. Information gathering was something he’d been good at, once, and this had to be the place.
The files in Lena’s office hurt far more than the rest. It was grating to even try and think about them, the words rushing by so fast they threatened to grind him up in their motion.
But Jon wanted answers, goddammit.
He pushed his broken mind into something that vaguely resembled a whole and focused.
There was something there, beyond the words and the statements and the emails and everything that flooded these computers. If Jon imagined himself zooming out, he could almost see it. It lay at the center of the system, at the center of the webs. It was the OIAR and yet it was bigger, a dark shadow on the horizon, and it was closer than he’d realized.
He filtered through the fuzz, the words, and the noise, and was trying to take another look when Lena frowned and stopped her typing.
“I advise you not to stare,” said Lena, looking directly into the camera, and Jon felt with a bone-chilling certainty that she saw him.
Jon avoided her office after that.
Martin spoke to Alice more than any other staff member.
That wasn’t to say she listened. After the initial surprise of an automated voice that shouldn’t have existed, Alice tended to treat their little monologues as more of a coffee break than a warning. She wasn’t quite as calm as her put-together attitude suggested; Jon could feel the unrest wafting off her with each case she skimmed, ignored, and tried to put out of her mind.
But despite all the warnings that fell on covered ears and an empty desk, Martin didn’t stop.
For the millionth time Jon wished he could talk to him. The best they could do was throw cases back and forth, choosing from their seemingly endless supply of horror to try and find one with meaning. When Martin read cases Jon would listen and try to figure out if this was just another warning to add to the pile, or if Martin was speaking to him.
There were far too many incidents for each one to be meaningful. Jon was certain he spent most of that time searching for meaning that wasn't there, creating connections that existed only because he hoped they did.
It wasn’t as if he had anything else to do.
Martin read Alice cases about isolation. Loneliness. Regret. She listened to the first few, and ignored the rest as they kept coming.
After a time the pattern stopped, but a new one arose. Martin would read a case. Alice would go to the breakroom for a coffee, and run into someone to talk with. Colin, Teddy, sometimes even Gwen. She’d chat with them, crack a few jokes, grab some more caffeine. The breakroom was never empty when Martin gave her a case. For just a few minutes he’d push her towards her coworkers, out of that isolated haze she tried so hard to hide.
The Fears were different, here. They twisted in ways Jon had not seen before. Plenty of familiar horrors were still visible, but some had flowered, in a way, branching off and mixing together to create new abominations.
The fog around Alice was not like any fog Jon had seen before, but parts of it were familiar. Some of it was made of shadow and some of mist and some of things he could only guess at. It was invisible to all but him, he suspected, and Martin.
Some parts of the fog looked like the fog that had surrounded Martin once upon a time.
Jon watched as Martin tried to steer Alice towards those who cared about her, situations where that fog would falter for even a moment. He would have varying degrees of success, but he never gave up. Alice was practically a stranger to them, but Jon got the sense that under better circumstances she might have been a friend. She reminded Jon of Tim, back before everything had gone wrong, and he was sure Martin thought the same.
He cast his mind back even further, to his days in research. Everything before the Archives felt like a strange dream, but Jon remembered it well. Back at the start, Tim had been different. He threw himself into work almost as ferociously as Jon, searching for answers he would never find. He preferred to work alone, occasionally offering a thin-lipped smile or joke that didn’t quite land, taking up projects that Jon only now realized had all been about the Circus.
A few months had passed like that before Tim started to calm. He talked more with their deskmates, let the rage and grief that had been driving him falter. He dragged Jon to trivia night at a bar they both frequented, which, though he’d been loath to admit it at the time, had been the most fun had had in ages. When Sasha transferred he welcomed her into their desk clump, and the two of them were as thick as thieves in no time.
In that last tape, Tim had said he allowed himself to grow comfortable. Lost his focus.
Was that really how it had gone?
Tim had been happier, before the Archives ripped off the band-aid and exposed the old wound to air. What he saw as giving up was just allowing himself to move on. To live again.
If Jon had never requested he transfer, perhaps he could have stayed happy.
He thought he saw a reflection of that drive within Alice. She hadn’t buried her dead, whoever they were; they lived in her mind rent-free. She was stuck in that in-between, almost like Jon and Martin were: unwilling to face her demons, but unwilling to let them rest.
Martin saw that. Stranger or not, he wasn't willing to let her go down that road.
He couldn’t do anything to help Alice, trapped and silenced as he was, but maybe her coworkers could. And so, again and again, Martin nudged her towards them.
Stuck behind the glass of a computer screen, Jon could do nothing but watch and remember how much he loved this man.
From the cameras, Jon could see the lines in the sky. He could see the thin strands of web that stretched across the world, spinning from their origin point at Hill Top Road. They sat there like a road map overlaid across his vision, and the people who walked within their lines had no idea they existed.
They clung to the people of the OIAR like hairs to a balloon. They did not impede them; they were as untouchable as they were invisible to all eyes except Jon's, and he saw the way they stretched and twisted with their movements. They stretched off to distant places he could not see, varying amounts tangling around each person. They were thinner around people he saw on the street, on those occasions where he managed to slip into the lens of a surveillance camera. Something about the OIAR seemed to draw them until the whole place was wrapped up like some twisted gift box.
They weren't real, of course. Jon felt certain that had he a hand to reach out with, there would be nothing corporeal to touch. Still they fluttered like ghosts in the wind, and when the building was deserted each morning he could see them twitching and moving as those they were connected to went about their lives.
When Teddy left for the last time, those threads hadn't broken. Jon watched them stretch as his figure receded from the building. Compared to people like Alice or Gwen, Teddy didn't have a lot of web surrounding him, but Jon could have sworn the number had grown.
Jon kept track of the threads he remembered to be Teddy's. They were especially thick around the computer, so it was often difficult to discern them, but then again Jon had a lot of time on his hands.
He waited for the threads to weaken, to accept that Teddy no longer worked there. Perhaps they'd snap.
Really, Jon had always known they wouldn't.
After Teddy left, the threads binding him to the OIAR only grew thicker, and Jon found himself pitying the man; he was just as trapped as the Archival staff.
On Sam’s first day, the webs around the OIAR grew thicker. They crisscrossed and overlapped in ways that were not possible, weaving a tapestry of lies and deceit. They did not control. Not yet, at least. They simply were, the way the tendrils of death Oliver Banks saw were.
Jon had spent a lot of time thinking about those lines. He’d jumped from Eye to Eye, studying those with the most threads surrounding them, studying those with almost none.
He found Georgie, at one point, invisible webs draped around her like a coat. He’d followed a hunch and used a strand of those webs to find Melanie, then Basira, then Daisy.
(He couldn’t bring himself to look for this world’s Martin, Tim, or Sasha. Not yet.)
He found Gerry and Gertrude, the webs around their home so thick Jon could barely see through them. Gerry paid them no mind, but they clung to him like pieces of plastic wrap. Some of them were burned, he saw. Some of them hung loose and frayed, their unconnected silk still clinging to him.
It barely made a difference. More than enough of them were still connected.
He fled when Gertrude arrived. She stepped through her door, and then her head swung around and she looked at him, and Jon fled with a sudden certainty that she could destroy him just as she’d destroyed those burned bits of web.
The webs around Sam were thick, possibly even thicker than the ones around Gerry. They shifted as he moved, connected to some horrible tapestry. They marked him as someone important, and Jon feared for him.
Most people’s webs stretched far into the distance, connecting them to people and places hundreds of miles away. The web of connections stretched across the ground and the sky and everywhere and Jon could not unsee it.
One of the strings surrounding Sam led to the computer, and Jon watched with a horrified fascination as he approached.
People with more webs, Jon knew, were important, whether they realized it or not.
The OIAR, Jon suspected, was playing with fire, both figuratively and literally.
This, Jon feared, was the start of something. The kickoff of some new set of events.
Jon spent some time reeling as Alice showed Sam around, completely unaware of the fact that something had begun and Jon didn’t know how to stop it.
Martin chose that moment to speak to Sam and Alice, and for the first time, Jon did not listen, too busy thinking to properly hear.
Jonah was watching Sam. Jonah flicked from computer to camera to phone, and Jon followed him. They could not speak to one another any more than Jon could speak to Martin, but Jon was certain he was there. If the Lonely was what cloaked Martin’s presence, the Eye made sure Jon and Jonah were aware of each other.
(He didn’t know where Martin was, each time the two of them went off on some wild game of electronic tag. He had no way of knowing if Martin was following, or if he had stayed in the basement, listening and speaking and waiting. He had no way of knowing if Martin could sense him at all beyond the occasional staticy murmur of speech.)
When Martin fell silent once more, Jon saw the look in Sam’s eyes and knew that it was over.
He knew that look. He knew that look from the naive, hotheaded researcher who, a lifetime ago, had taken a job at the Magnus Institute.
Sam was curious. Too curious. And something told Jon that nothing he did would be able to warn him.
Jon thought back to his own first statement: an anglerfish. A light in the darkness, promising knowledge, drawing him in. And beyond, something bigger than he could have ever imagined possible, waiting to consume him.
Perhaps it wasn’t too late.
Jon could only use words he had been given, but he tried regardless. Sam was a smart man. Surely he knew there was something odd about the computer system. Surely he’d understand this was meant to be a warning. Surely Jon wouldn’t have to watch another world crumble to pieces.
Leave while you can, he tried to urge. The canary is dead. Get out.
The computer’s fan let out a huff of air not unlike a breath, the breeze rustling the invisible webs that stretched across every bit of the room.
