jon sees before he sees, jon knows before he knows, eyes merely an extension of the mind merely an extension of the self — everything all mixed-up and everywhere in the post-everything of it all. jon knows before he gets back to london, speeding in martin’s beat-up car down empty highways because it isn’t as if something as small as traffic laws makes a difference now, that elias — that jonah magnus is still there. jon knows before he turns down this particular street ( far emptier than a street in central london should be, though he supposes the end of the world will do that to a city, leave it a hollowed out husk like this ) that elias is here, in front of the husk of what was the institute.
jon has more than one knife in his bag. daisy’s safehouse had no shortage of weaponry, and with shaking hands he and martin had carried everything they could find that could hurt into the car. everything that could protect them in the days to come. he thinks about reaching for it now. the thought echoes.
@watcheir : killing me will not save your world. *
elias sounds so goddamn smug about it all that jon almost wants to try anyway, wants to charge forward knife in hand. wants to be brave, for once, like tim or melanie or daisy would. but tim’s dead. but melanie’s blind, probably dead by now, too. but daisy’s . . . well, the list of the dead grows by the day and he can’t think about them now, can’t muse on what they would have done, because they could not and the world has ended and jon was never that type of brave anyway, even when things were whole.
the knives stay in his bag, clutched to his side as tight as he can manage. jon feels suddenly very small under the watchful gaze of the sky.
he does not step forward, leaves an emptied-out street’s width of distance between them, though he can see elias just as well as if they were a meter away from one another and knows that sight is returned, and can hear him equally clearly. distance won’t save either of them, but it’s a comforting placebo. archivist-turned-apocalypse faces king of a ruined world on a once-familiar roadway. nothing is as it should be, and jon knows in an instant that to elias, everything is as it should be, wearer of that cursed crown, delighting in the end of things.
and it’s that knowledge that makes jon speak at last, pouring every ounce of power he has into it : his voice still weak, has been since that damned monologue forced upon him that had opened such terrible doorways, but the static in it enough to crackle streetlights & swirl out of too many eyes. ‘ then what will? ’ something must. elias must know how to reverse this. jon recalls words dragged kicking forth from his own lips : mouthpiece of destruction, much as he’d clawed at his own throat trying to make the statement stop. he wants to do the same. wants to pull this information from elias, wants the knowledge of it all. wants it to hurt.
