Chapter Text
It was the day of Jonathan Sims's birth, in the year of 2015, in the Archives of the Magnus Institute, when everything started to go wrong.
Or perhaps when everything started to go right. If history were to be written by the victors, 'when everything started to go right' would be recorded carefully down on the page.
If history were written by Gertrude Robinson, 'When Jonathan Sims was sacrificed to save the world' is how she would have put it, without a single drip of regret in her voice. She had sacrificed more than enough people in her time with the fate of the world in the balance, and she had never once regretted it. Jonathan Sims's life was not something she would hold particular remorse for, had she been there and able to scrawl out history with a pen.
Jonathan Sims's downfall, much like the thing that drew him to the Magnus Institute in the first place, was a book. He found it on the corner of his desk after the party, wrapped neatly in old parchment paper. He half-assumed it was from Elias. He opened it that evening when he got back to his flat. There was a small plaque on the inside that read "From The Library of Gertrude Robinson." It winked up at him, an inside joke, one that he could not understand, would not understand for months and months and months. It furthered his assumption that this was a gift from Elias Bouchard.
It sent a chill of fear tingling down his spine, but he did not listen to that. He had gotten surprisingly good at not listening to his own body's signs of fear, even though he had not been the Head Archivist for very long.
He read.
He felt.
He experiences.
He fears.
He fears so many things, he feels the fears of every single person that he doomed, the crushing power of the Fourteen made manifest, and he Knows. He Knows everything, and ocean of too-much drowning him and yet the only thing he can breathe, the past and the present and his future in the black and glowing pupil of an infinite Eye that consumes him —
And then he opened his eyes. He was sitting in his flat, right where he had started reading the book. It was still the year 2015. It was no longer his birthday.
Jonathan Sims — the mind of Jonathan Sims, the experiences of Jonathan Sims, the fears and hopes and pain and sacrifice and love of the life and death and life and ascension and consumption and death of Jonathan Sims — sat in the unscarred, unblemished, untested body of Jonathan Sims. The powers of the Archivist curled and twisted through weak, mortal flesh which had not earned them, held at bay by a steeltrap mind that had, fed by the fear of billions of endings that had not happened yet.
"I'm going to save the world," the Archivist said.
And then he passed out.
#-------#
There was a blaring sound, fading in and out with a heavy horrible presence that reminded him of air raid sirens, carrying with it an inevitability of stale fear and death and—
His alarm. It was his alarm. It was the morning and this was his alarm and he'd dreamed of the apocalypse and every single terrible thing he'd caused and now he needed to go in to work and act like he knew absolutely nothing because if there was one thing that was true in both future and past it was that he had no idea how to go up against Jonah Magnus.
It does tickle me, that in this world of would-be occult dynasties and ageless monsters, the Chosen One is simply that – someone I chose, Magnus had said. It’s not in your blood, or your soul, or your destiny. It’s just in your own, rotten luck.
The only chance he had of stopping Magnus was being chosen again and just. Doing better this time. Being more careful. Not losing anything or anyone but Magnus couldn't know or he'd be killed and replaced—
There was a small voice in his head that wondered if this whole thing was some weird delusion brought on by something that was almost certainly a Leitner in disguise. He was still touching the cover of the book, he noticed. He couldn't make his fingers let it go. He stopped trying to fling it away and tucked it into the inside pocket of his waistcoat. He could pry his fingers from it then, as it settled itself in safe by his side.
His clothes were rumpled. Yesterday's clothes. But it seemed like such a daunting, impossible task to make it into his bedroom and actually change and he felt more and more anxiety building up of being away from his Archives, it— he was just— he was running late from his normal routine was all, and his archival assistants would notice if he was late. So he didn't have time. He just needed to leave the flat and walk down to the tube and get to the Archive and do his job and forget that this ever happened.
You can test it, a traitorous voice in his brain whispered. Ask someone a question.
There was a sudden roiling sensation of nausea in his gut. It was all he could do not to dry heave. He made it to his bathroom, and just sort of knelt on the cold tile floor, a strange supplication to a strange and terrible God. He felt.... sick. Terrified every time his mind tried to shy away from the certainty that everything he'd just felt was real and suddenly it felt like someone — something — was Watching him.
Half-petulantly, he tried to turn his own internal gaze back to the endless abyss, and a comfort sunk over him. Rightness. There was a dull ache in his stomach, an itch on his skin, that he knew the Archives would cure. That statements would cure. He was ready for the nausea to hit again at that, but it didn't, just a terrible sense of half guilt and half comfort, with an aftertinge of sadness.
The Beholder would protect him, if he'd let it.
But that was wrong. It had to be wrong. When does it stop, he'd remembered asking. The guilt. The misery. When does the Eye make me monstrous?
Why would it ever do that? Helen-who-had-become-a-monster had said. Will say. When has your guilt, or your sadness, or your hand-wringing ever actually stopped you from doing what it wants?
The Beholding didn't care about protecting him. It didn't care about anything. It didn't think, it was an Entity, born of fear and made of fear and beyond human comprehension and even if it did have some alien ability to think or feel, it wouldn't care, the Ceaseless Watcher was just that— it Watched. It didn't intervene. It didn't help.
Jon — the Archivist — was on his own.
He stumbled to his feet and clutched the sink to stay upright as he tried to splash some water on his face. When he looked up, his eyes were wrong.
Not in any way he could quantify. They were the same washed-out but too-dark brown, more concentrated pigment than color, just as they'd always been, but they— they seemed too deep. He didn't even know how that could make sense, but they were too—
He believed everything, he realized. No need to test it. No excuses of 'just a shitily disguised Leitner' to cling to. There were Fourteen timeless entities of fear superimposed over reality and he could feel every single one of them in little spikes of fear flaring up around the world, not his yet, but soon to be. He had an Archive full of crumbs of knowledge about them and a handful of years to stop himself from ending the world. He could almost see it — the reflections of the unblinking sky — in his own gaze.
He tore his eyes away from the mirror and put on sunglasses. He wasn't human, why should his eyes look the same? He had the Archives waiting for him and nowhere else that it made sense for him to be.
#-------#
Despite his inhuman status — or perhaps because of it — taking the tube to work was not the best of choices. Memories of the Buried rose up in his chest, choking him, and it was only the siren's call of the Archives that he could feel coming closer and closer that got him off at the right stop. There was a strange push and tug of how much he let the feelings — the memories — envelop him, a tradeoff of hunger and strength and terror and he didn't know how to find a happy medium of knowing just enough.
And then the Archivist was returned to his Archives.
Alone. He looked around, a bit confused as to why he was alone, and then glanced at the watch on his wrist. It was apparently not even 7AM yet.
It was fine. It was better this way. Just him and his Archives and some time to...think.
They were beautiful. They were horrible, all the perfect knowledge scattered in purposefully disorganized piles and left to wilt, and the burning need to fix it. Sorting truths from untruths, categorizing the real statements, digitalizing the false ones because he had — would have — pride in everything here as a whole, in what they could become. Here he could bridge the gap between what he was and what he could be.
Almost in a trance, he drifted to his desk. The tape recorder was there, Tim had left in his office— the memories of his birthday, and all the pain they would serve to bring. He put in a new tape. Nathan Watts's statement lay on his desk, amongst the ones that he had gathered that didn't digitally record.
Statement of Jacob, no second name given, July 15th 2011.
It’ll get you too. You can stare all you want, make your notes and your inquiries, but all your beholding will come to nothing. When the time arrives, and all is darkness and butchery, you’ll wish you had stopped listening and run.
He suppressed a shudder. No, he didn't need to read that one, didn't need to experiment on whether Elias could hear it or not. The tape recorders worked well enough.
"Statement of Nathan Watts," he heard himself say, as if in some sort of fugue. "Regarding an encounter on Old Fishmarket Close, Edinburgh. Original statement given April 22nd 2012."
#-------#
It would be easier, he decided, if he could just think of himself as Jonathan Sims from the future. But that wasn't entirely true. He could remember the apocalypse— days, weeks, months into the apocalypse— but the further he tried to go, it wasn't— it wasn't even like the less he remembered, more like, well, the more, until there was too much to parse anything comprehensible about his own experience. It all faded out to a wall of nothingness with all the darkness and crushing pressure of being too deep under the ocean. Too much to remember. Too much to be that Jon. If he had to hazard a guess, he would say that that Jon was too broken to do anything.
But he also wasn't just Jonathan Sims of the past — of the present — with memories of the future. Walking around his Archives, he could see the truths from the untruths without even opening the boxes, could taste the flavors of the statements themselves, knew what Entity they would be associated with. It would certainly make the organization easier this time around.
Yes, his Archives would do nicely in all of this. But he — he — almost felt like some sort of weird in-between mishmash of what Jonathan Sims was, possessed by the ghost of what he could be.
And the ghost of what he could be had very strong opinions on what it wanted his Archives to look like. Was it a misuse of fear-monster powers to suddenly know every single library and archival classification system in human history perfectly? And more importantly, was it a misuse of boss powers to suddenly switch his assistants over from attempting to fix up Gertrude's system with the Dewey Decimal ideas everyone had been throwing around to a colon classification system? They were mostly working on digitalizing and following up on research, it shouldn't make things too much more difficult for them.
It took his assistants about an hour to get in from the time he began moving boxes around. They needed new better materials. Boxes and shelves that would — that would stack properly so that things weren't sticking out and falling down.
"Are you okay, boss?" Tim asked.
Jon definitely nearly fell down.
"I— I need to talk to you all about— about the filing system," he said.
"Riiiight," Tim said. "You look really spooked. Like you just saw a ghost or something."
"I—" Jon glanced around for inspiration. "There was a spider."
"We are re-doing the filing system.....because of a spider?" Tim said.
"No it....it needs to not be in my Archives," Jon said.
"Oookay," Sasha said, stepping forward. "I am taking the spider out of the Archives. Tim, Martin, maybe help with the boxes, and then we can all talk about the new filing system?"
Come on weird evil fear-god powers, find me a spider.
"It's....in that corner," Jon said, pointing a trembling finger to one of the bottom shelves he'd removed a box from.
"Okay, yeah, I see it," Sasha said soothingly. "Getting a paper and a cup."
"You're....hyperventilating," Tim said.
Yes, because there actually was a fucking spider there, Jon couldn't say. Whether the knowledge or the spider scared him more, he couldn't say — he was rather torn between the childhood trauma and the right now trauma of this is real, this is happening and the little voice in his head that still tried to say that this all could be a coincidence.
And then it was like it was happening in slow motion:
"You should sit down, I've got you a chair," Martin said, and he did rush forward with a chair, only the boxes had been left haphazardly stacked where Jon had been digging through them and it was as inevitable as it was unstoppable: Martin-and-the-chair knocked into a tower of boxes, and the whole thing toppled, and toppled, and toppled, like cursed dominos.
"I'll be in my office," Jon said smartly, and he turned on heel and didn't slam his own door behind him, but only just.
#-------#
"Okay, that was weird," Sasha said. "You have to admit that was weird."
"The man is clearly hung over," Tim said. "Sunglasses down in the Archives? Didn't stop drinking when he got home, that's my call. Maybe did something a bit stronger, had a bad trip or something. Birthdays are hard."
"D'you....d'you think he's okay?" Martin said.
"The spider was behind where those boxes had been," Sasha said. "What was he doing? Was he chasing it? Or was he doing something else and trying to cover it up by pointing to the place he thought was most likely to have a spider?"
"Sometimes you just see a really nasty spider," Tim said.
"In this lighting? With sunglasses on?" Sasha said.
"Alright, fine, it's weird," Tim said. "What are we going to do about it?"
Sasha turned to Martin, and not to be left out, Tim turned to Martin too.
"What?" Martin squawked.
"You make him tea a lot," Sasha said.
"I make everyone tea a lot," Martin said.
"Maybe go make him a cup of tea," Tim said, jumping on board. "See if you can get him to confess whatever's going on. Sometimes all it takes is a nice cup of tea and a friendly face when you're hung over."
"Tim," Sasha said. "It's the nice thing to do, Martin. You're nice. Just to make sure he's okay."
Martin glared between the two of them before he seemed to remember that he was terrified at the mere concept of either of them questioning what he was doing here too much to question anything they asked him to do. "Fine," he said. "But not for you. I'm making him tea because he looks like he needs a cup of tea, okay?" And he shuffle-stormed off, an almost-hilarious mirror of the boss he couldn't be less like.
"You're sending him into the wolfden, you know that, right?" Tim said. "Jon's been picking on him since day one and is in a bad mood. That is not going to go well for Martin."
"Sorry," Sasha sighed, and ran a hand through her hair. "This just really is a mess and it— does he have any idea how much work switching over the filing system will be? We've spent the last three weeks prepping the filing system that we all agreed on and then out of nowhere—"
"Upset that he's messing with what should have been your Archives?" Tim said.
"I'm upset that he's messing with us," Sasha said. "He could have called out sick if he was feeling that bad. Not take it out on us."
They stared at the mess together.
"It's a hangover," Tim said. "It'll be gone in a day and then maybe he'll apologize."
"Jonathan Sims? Apologize?" Sasha said. "Now there we'd know he'd been killed and replaced by a doppelganger, or at the very least that the world was ending." She sighed. "Well. These scattered, unstapled statements aren't going to pick themselves up."
#-------#
Jon was decidedly not sulking in his office. And if his hands were trembling, well—
He felt weird. Strange-hungry, not normal-hungry, not fear-hungry, but fear would be better than nothing, he knew. Like eating — candy or junk food when you hadn't had a real meal in a while, better than nothing but still something that turned the stomach.
He wondered if everything in this beautiful, bright, living world felt like junk food to an Entity that knew the taste of a world that had ended, a world that It presided over, over all others.
"That has to be it, right?" he asked the ceiling. It was stupid because Elias could—
Not being watched, the thought came to him. A flash of an image of Elias in a meeting.
"Fine." He glared at the ceiling. "That has to be it. This fear tastes all....unfulfilling in the face of what you could be having."
He got the feeling the Beholding was laughing at him.
He opened his mouth to— what, talk to a god? talk to himself? When there was a knock on his door that didn't wait for him to answer it. He closed his mouth abruptly.
"I brought you tea," Martin squeaked.
It hurt like a punch to the gut — worse than a punch to the gut — to see Martin. Tim and Sasha he knew died but Martin—
He was almost certain that Martin had died too, after the apocalypse. He couldn't remember it. He wasn't sure if it was because it was too far after, beyond what he could reach, or if it was because he didn't want to reach it.
And thinking about it made him hungry. Martin wasn't— Martin didn't have any proper chronicles of fear etched into his soul yet, just human fears. About his lies being discovered. About his mother. About Jon being alright, and Jon knew, he could just look a bit closer and Martin would feel real fear, the weight of being watched by something that couldn't possibly be watching, and it wouldn't quite be consuming an experience but it also wouldn't be nothing—
It wasn't good for Martin to get close to him. Not now, not when he didn't know what he was.
He summoned the most cold, patronizing, disappointed look that he could. "Put it down on the corner of my desk. Much as I appreciate the gesture, Martin, I would prefer if you were actually doing the work you were hired to do. Statements aren't following up — or picking up — themselves."
The man he loved turned bright red, all-but-dropped the tea on the edge of the desk like it burned him, and all-but-ran from the room.
Jon tried to steel his heart. He had too much else to regret to be feeling this dreadful over being rude in the face of tea.
#-------#
"He's acting perfectly normal," Martin hissed as he slammed a mug of tea on Tim's desk. A bit of it spilled over the rim. Tim didn't comment about getting liquid on the statements because Tim didn't actually give a fuck about the Archives. Martin had gone in with a different colored mug for Jon, which means at the very least Jon had accepted his cup.
It was funny, Tim mused. No matter what Jon said to and about Martin, he always accepted Martin's tea.
"And I really don't appreciate you guys throwing me under the bus like that," Martin was saying. "Bring him tea yourselves the next time you're 'so worried.'" He slammed a mug of tea on Sasha's desk too.
It was sad that Martin still tried to take care of everyone around him when they were treating him like shit, Tim decided.
"Thank you, Martin," Sasha said.
"Thank you," Tim echoed, feeling a bit chided even though no one had said anything. Felt like someone was watching down here, not even in a creepy way, in a mom-always-knew-and-was-disappointed kind of way.
Martin gave a little smile at that, and the three of them got to work.
#-------#
Their boss decided to emerge well after lunch, deep enough into the afternoon that Tim was considering leaving; after cleaning up and finishing up the follow-up on the statements Jon had assigned them, if the filing system really was changing there wasn't much more they could do until they knew what it was changing to.
But their boss did indeed emerge.
"I am very sorry about springing the different filing system on all of you," said what Tim was pretty sure was Jonathan Sims, much to the surprise and horror of two of his three archival assistants. "I know how hard you worked on it, Sasha, and I really do think you would have been a fantastic Archivist if you were given the chance and I appreciate all of the hard work and help that you have put in to trying to get this place into order. The plans for the digitalizable files will be untouched. The ones that I need to record on tape are the ones that I will be using my new system for. I will mostly be concentrating on those. I will be speaking to Elias about getting sturdier shelving and uniformly sized boxes to hold the statements, but otherwise, you should continue with the general tasks I have given you of sorting and cursory research and I will specifically ask you to look into things further when I need you."
Tim and Sasha just stared at him. Martin was also staring, but he was wringing his hands, which in Tim's opinion was destroying what would otherwise be a perfect tableau.
"Thank you very much for your.....service," he said, and turned on his heel and marched back into his office for the second time that day. Tim got the very strong feeling that he wouldn't be leaving until they all left for home.
"D'you....okay-do-you-maybe-think-that-was-weird?" Martin said in a rush.
"Y—" Tim tried to say, but Sasha elbowed him in the ribs.
"Pressure's getting to him, and he feels bad that he snapped at us when he came in with a hangover," Sasha said. "Nothing more human than that."
Tim waited until Martin left the room before: "What?"
The look Sasha gave him was half condescending, half pitying. "He heard us talking when we were stapling. And probably when we were just cleaning up," she said, voice well below conversational volume. "Sound must carry really well down here. And now not only does he feel in over his head with this promotion and slightly guilty for accepting the job anyway, but he also thinks that the three assistants that he brought with him are bitter, actively think that he's incompetent, and are talking about him behind his back. And you know what? He wouldn't be wrong, and I feel like a bit of a shitty friend for it."
She stared at his closed office door. "It has to be. That's the reasonable explanation. It makes sense."
"I dunno," Tim said. "How do you feel about aliens? I think maybe aliens. It's always aliens."
Sasha laughed. "Give him a week, then I'll consider aliens."
"Two days ago you were considering quitting," Tim said.
"Yeah well," Sasha said. She raised the empty mug of tea that had been on her desk since the morning in a mock salute. "To being better a friend."
#-------#
They tried to drag him out to lunch the next day, and the day after that. It was only when Tim commented "Seriously, boss? You're looking really hungry, if I didn't know better I'd say you hadn't eaten at all in the last few days, do I have to host an intervention?" that Jon took them seriously and fell upon a sandwich like a starving man. And then put it down half-eaten, looking uncomfortable and sallow, and stated that he had decided he was going to be a vegetarian and lurched across the canteen to buy himself a salad. Sasha had surreptitiously sniffed the remains of his beef sandwich when his back was turned, but it didn't smell off or anything.
They made sure to drag him to lunch every day after that, but he still seemed to be getting weirdly skinny weirdly fast. Not that he'd ever been solidly built. Only his clothes didn't— fit differently, he just seemed gaunter every time they looked at him.
The sunglasses went after the first day, and were replaced by a pair of extremely thick spectacles. Jon mumbled something about having a hard time reading the written statements in the dim light of the Archives. Sasha, who had been doing everything in her power to be Nice and Helpful and Understanding, begrudgingly put "is obviously trying to hide his eyes" on the "maybe a doppelganger" list.
Sasha tried to get him to come to trivia night at the pub, which Jon had liked when they were all researchers. Not that he'd ever admit it, and then he'd be insufferable every time they'd hit a topic he'd seen a documentary then went down a rabbit hole over. He said no.
Sasha tried to host a board game night, even though she hated board games — mostly, hated being bad at them but hated even more the sheer amount of ruthless she always became to win — and even with the not-so-subtle "it'll be just like old times" Jon turned them down. It was not just like old times with Martin sitting there, completely unaware of the whole board game night dynamic, until Tim called it early.
Friday he swept out of the Archives precisely at 5pm moving with such a dedicated purpose that they could barely call out their goodbyes to him, let alone try to invite him to anything. It was supposed to have been another attempt at pub night, but the words died on Sasha's lips before she could get them out.
She and Tim waited until Martin parted ways from them on the walk out from the Institute to the various public transit they all used, and then both turned without speaking the way that would take them to the dingy little pub by Sasha's place. Their boss had quite possibly gotten possessed by a ghost or eaten by an artefact or Tim really didn't want to let the aliens option die, and they were going to need to be a little bit less sober to deal with it.
#-------#
Jon was acting weird, and Martin knew it. Tim and Sasha couldn't — or wouldn't — see it, which was really funny, because they were the ones who had thought Jon was acting strange in the first place but when he tried to bring it up with Tim the next day, Tim had brushed him off with a pithy statement about how maybe Jon was going through some personal stuff, and how hangovers could be a spiritual experience. He and Sasha had both looked guilty and also had suddenly started trying to hang out with Jon again, like the three of them were still all back in Research and still didn't notice Martin — which was funny, because Martin was invited this time around. Invited to grab lunch in the employee canteen, invited to trivia night at the pub, invited to board game night, although that one had ended in less than an hour after a very awkward and not particularly enjoyable game of Dominion where Sasha crushed them all and then Tim had made some excuses about needing to get home early — but Martin was very clearly an afterthought, invited because his absence would be louder than his presence.
But being ignored, it meant that he could, well — watch.
And something was wrong with Jon.
He moved differently, and it wasn't just the obvious things, how the smallest, simplest things seemed to shake him. He moved — Martin didn't really know how to describe it, but the closest he could put was Jon moved through space like he always knew exactly where everything was. And sure, hey, maybe new glasses brought on better spacial awareness but there was something weird about it. And about the way that he watched all the assistants when he thought they weren't looking.
(They had all been looking.)
But the real thing that tipped Martin off was that Jon was no longer rude when Martin brought him tea. He stared at him instead, with too-wide, too-deep eyes — it had to be some sort of weird effect of the new spectacles, magnifying his pupils, a trick of the light — and just looked so sad. And he would say "thank you." If Martin tried to get close to him or talk to him at all he'd snap back into himself, say something mean, but it would come out pained, and he would always say thank you. Martin kept trying, though, squeaked out on Thursday afternoon as he was coming around with his third round of tea and the Archivist just looked so tired sitting at his desk, recording statement after statement straight since morning —
"Do you want to get some fresh air?"
And Jon had looked startled but said yes, and they'd made their way to the courtyard and as it happened there were no other Institute employees taking smoke breaks or anything, so they were alone. Jon's fingers twitched, but last Martin knew, he had quit smoking, and he didn't reach and pull anything out of his pockets, so maybe he had.
They stood in silence for a minute or three, just looking out across the lonely, empty little courtyard, when —
"Is there anything you want to talk about?" Jon asked tentatively.
And Martin had found that yeah, actually, there kind of was. With his mother gone and how she'd been refusing to see him but mostly about how he missed her despite everything and how it was — hard, adjusting, and coming home to an apartment where he lived alone and with the holidays coming up it was all kind of getting to him. And he had talked for a while and he felt really listened to, really heard, and better than he had in a while. Jon didn't push him or rush him. Just watched so solemnly with his sad, too-big eyes and nodded at appropriate times and when the silence pushed back in after it felt like a balm, like something poisonous had been extracted from Martin.
Like he wasn't so lonely after all.
The thing was, Martin knew that the universe didn't work this way. He didn't get good things. His mother pushed him away, his co-workers looked down on him, and Jon both pushed him away and looked down on him. Something had happened to Jon. Something had happened with his birthday or with the Archive or with the statements that he had to record on tape or with — Martin wasn't sure what but something must have happened. And as much as he wanted to just — be selfish, and keep this Jonathan Sims who apparently cared about him and all of them, he owed it to Jon to try to at least figure out what happened. Do some — snooping, or whatever. He followed up on statements, it couldn't be that much different following up on a person.
Martin wasn't even looking for it, but come Monday the opportunity presented itself: Elias called Jon up for a performance review, and Tim and Sasha were back in the stacks, leaving the Archivist's office entirely unoccupied and unwatched.
And he couldn't just.... not go in there and poke around. There were piles of statements and research on the desk, as expected. The mug of tea Martin had delivered that morning, half-drunk. Martin wasn't quite sure what he was looking for, but whatever it was, nothing on the desk looked.... off.
He was about to tell himself to snap out of it and get out of there before someone caught him when he noticed that the bottom left drawer was open. Just a bit, but enough that his eye was drawn to it. He yanked it open.
Inside was a book.
As if in a trance, he reached down to pick it up.