Chapter Text
Sasha
Sasha wakes up with a lingering scream still caught in her throat.
She gasps, flailing wildly at the thing pinning her down and holding her restrained until she is able to throw it off, and it is only as it slides gently to the floor with a soft flump that she recognizes it as her bedsheets.
But how- she had been-
A dream. It had just been a dream.
It must have just been a dream.
The sigh that leaves her at that realization is both relieved and embarrassed: she's not usually one to get nightmares, so to react so violently to this one feels strange and vaguely shameful. A point in favor of living alone, no matter what her mother might say about it; she's grateful there was no one here to see.
What a nightmare it had been, though.
Sasha grabs her phone and glasses off the nightstand, unplugging the one from the charger and putting on the other to check the time. Still fifteen minutes before her alarm is set to go off, so she clicks the screen off again and fetches her blankets from the floor, burrowing back under them with a shiver - both from the chill autumn air, and from the chilling remnants of her dream.
...Autumn?
She grabs her phone again, checking the date: late October.
That can't be right. It's July, isn't it?
Dizzying confusion overtakes her for a moment, as she mentally runs back over her dream from the night before and tries to work out where it had started, and where the real world ended.
Late October 2015... she's only been working in the Archives for a short while. So the whole extended chaos of the stretch of time she's recalling-
Just a dream.
Well, she thinks, that actually makes a lot more sense than it all being real. Things got weird.
It feels real, though, so she shivers again and pulls the blankets tighter around her.
Sasha is not surprised that the dramatic climax of her nightmare had centered around Artifact Storage, and the things contained therein. Working there had been the worst three months of her life, and the few nightmares she has had, have come from that experience. It's strange that she was still working in the Archives in the dream, though; usually, she's tossed fully back into her old job, forced to interact with the cursed items on a daily basis to study them. She was just visiting in this dream, though. Just hiding.
It had made it feel a hell of a lot more realistic than if she'd dreamed she was still working there.
Sasha remains lost in thought until her alarm goes off, pulling a groan from her throat as she struggles back out of her warm blankets and her feet hit the cold floor. She really doesn't want to go into work today, but she will - even if she's considering leaving the Institute in the near future, that's no reason to slack off while she's still there. Jon got the promotion fair and square, and she'll support him through his... awkward stumbles... as he tries to find his feet in the new position.
Jon was in her nightmare. Him and Tim and Martin. They had had plenty of time to settle into the new job, there, and had found a sort of stability amongst the terrors they had been plagued with. She almost wishes it had been real; it certainly hadn't ended well for her, but she's going to be disappointed, heading into the office today and being greeted with the awkwardness of a fledgling department instead of the smoothly-functioning team she remembers.
It really hadn't ended well, though, so if that's what it takes to get them working together, she'll take the awkwardness. Even though it was only a product of her imagination, Sasha doesn't think she'll ever forget the sickening feeling of being unmade.
She shudders again as she drags a brush through her hair, wondering what on earth could have prompted such a strange dream. She doesn't think she even worked on the Prentiss case, back when it was active.
~~~~~
Sasha gets to the Institute at nine sharp, breezing through the doors and flashing a quick smile at Rosie as she strides to the stairs down to the Archives. The stairway door is still locked. She frowns, jiggling the handle for a moment before reaching for her keys. She doesn't think she's ever been the first one to work, since they all started down here - Jon's always in by the time she arrives.
Still, good on him for not pulling overtime for once, she muses as she unlocks the stairs and makes her way down. He's going to work himself into an early grave if he's not careful.
The lights flicker and buzz as she turns them on, reminding her uncomfortably of her dream. But the Archives remain silent and still around her, and though she jumps when she catches sight of something silver and shiny out of the corner of her eye, it is only a fallen paperclip. There are no worms.
Still, she's shaken by the time she gets to her desk - flipping to a new day in her calendar, suppressing the feeling of wrongness at the date. And so she sets her bag down at her desk, and heads for the breakroom to make tea before even turning on her laptop. Martin may have a point about its benefits, after all.
By the time she gets back with her tea Tim has arrived as well. He's bent over his laptop, still standing, with one hand on the desk for balance. There's a troubled frown on his face, and Sasha pauses, just for a moment, to appreciate this: the softer, serious side of Tim that he hides from the world but allows her to see.
Then she clears her throat, pasting a smile on her own face to pretend she didn't notice his mood. It's easier to smile, now that she's not alone down here.
"Morning, Tim," she says cheerily, walking to her desk and setting the tea down. He starts, standing up quickly, and when his eyes land on her they widen. "Everything alright?" she asks.
"Sasha," he says, voice slightly choked, and the next thing she knows he's striding across the room and catching her in a hug. She gives a small oof as he knocks the breath out of her, then returns it.
"Hi," she says, then guesses: "Long night?"
"The longest," he replies, voice muffled by her shoulder. "How are you?"
He sounds desperately genuine. Sasha holds him a little tighter. "I'm fine," she says, deciding then and there not to mention her dream. It was weird, and on a normal day they'd probably have a lot of fun picking it apart and laughing over the details, but right now Tim needs quiet support more than anything. "How are you?"
"Meh," he says, and she feels him shrug. "Just... one of those days, you know?" She does. They don't happen too often, but sometimes Tim gets caught in memories of his brother, and he's dragged down to melancholy for the rest of the day.
"Take the day off if you need it, yeah?" she says, and he laughs, just a little. He pulls back from the hug, hands lingering on her shoulders, and stares deep into her eyes for a moment.
"You're my best friend, you know that, right?" he says. "I don't know if I've ever told you."
"You're mine too," she replies easily. She wouldn't have run headfirst at a woman made of worms for him if he wasn't. Or- she wouldn't have dreamed doing that. She would do it in real life though, too, if she had to.
He nods, and lets go of her. "I'll be fine today. But thanks."
"Of course." Sasha smiles at him, then starts walking backward toward her desk. "If you're staying though we should probably get to work. Can't imagine Jon'll be too much later than this."
"Right, right," Tim says, and glances distractedly toward the door. "Yeah, he wanted me to-"
He cuts himself off as Jon enters.
There's a moment, just the barest moment, when Sasha sees emotion flash across Jon's face: something open and vulnerable, heartbroken and devastated. But the next she thinks she must have imagined it, because he's back to his usual stiff professionalism.
"Tim, Sasha," he says. "You're- good morning."
"Morning, Jon," Sasha says, and then leaves them to it when Tim goes over to talk to him, focusing on booting up her laptop instead.
"I got your email," she hears Tim say, as the login page comes up on her screen. "About the tape recorder?"
Sasha blinks, hard, and loses Jon's response in the wave of déjà vu that sweeps over her at those words. That had been part of her dream. A big part. The old tape recorder Tim had found in the back rooms, the obsessive way Jon would record statements on it. She remembers this conversation, she thinks - or one very like it, when Jon asked Tim to find the recorder for the first time. She remembers how things had only gotten worse from there.
She pushes the feeling aside. Tim has talked about the tape recorder before; that's probably why it had been in her dream.
Sasha shakes her head, and turns back to her work.
Martin arrives a few minutes later, looking frazzled, and she spares a moment to give him an amused but understanding grin for his tardiness. She doesn't think he sees, too focused on giving his apologies to Jon. Honestly, sometimes Sasha thinks he'd have a better chance getting into Jon's good graces if he just owned up to his false CV and admitted he was unqualified, rather than trying to live up to some unattainable ideal of the perfect assistant that not even someone trained for the position could reach.
It's not her place to say so, though, so she just hides her eye roll behind her screen and tunes out their conversation before she has to hear another of Jon's snide jabs at Martin's work.
The day quiets down after that, once everyone finally settles in. Tim starts working behind his own desk; Martin runs to the breakroom to make tea; Jon locks himself in his office. Sasha relaxes. The Archives are a quiet place to work, in general; and after the night she had, with all its frightening and confusing dreams, she's looking forward to having a nice, normal day in the office.
Tim
Tim wakes up with the lingering scent of sulfur in his nostrils.
He jolts up from where he is lying, stumbling halfway across the room on unsteady legs before he recognizes his surroundings. He's... home.
No. No, that can't be right.
His hands reach instinctively for the ax he had strapped to his back, finding only empty air. Right. He had dropped it, he thinks, after he'd hit Jon; switched over to trying to strangle him with his bare hands, and he only feels the slightest twinge of guilt about it. He hadn't known it was Jon he was attacking, after all, and besides it had been satisfying to see the asshole flat on his back and scared out of his wits. Tim's not usually one for schadenfreude, but he'll make an exception for his former friend.
But that doesn't explain why he's here.
He remembers the detonator. He remembers Jon's voice, that itching, unnatural power in it that had pulled clarity back to Tim's mind like a bucket of ice water on a hot summer's day. He remembers the clown, and he remembers the explosion, and then...
And then he woke up.
A harsh beeping starts up from his bedside table, and Tim snags the nearest item off the dresser behind him and whips it at the threat. It's only as his deodorant collides with the source of the beeping and sends them both clattering to the floor that he recognizes his alarm clock.
He hurries across the room to shut it off, and then stays there, crouched down next to it on the floor, breathing fast, eyes wide as he scans his room for any hint of a true threat. Nothing appears.
Does he have amnesia? He hadn't thought he would survive the explosion, but here he is living and breathing, so he must have been wrong. It seems reasonable that such a thing would have left him with brain damage, making him forget the whole process of hospitalization and recovery.
He feels too strong for that, though. Too healthy. And he doesn't think he's lucky enough for whatever's going on to have a normal explanation.
A trick, then. Some illusion or falsehood created by the Circus in a last-ditch attempt to stop him stopping their ritual. Or perhaps just as revenge. Either way, he has to be on the lookout for anything strange in the world around him, anything out of place that might be dangerous. He might not have the best odds of surviving, but he's sure as hell going to try, if only out of spite. He won't let them win.
With this in mind, he stands up from his defensive crouch. The first thing he sees is his own reflection in the mirror, and that, more than anything else, confirms his suspicion that something is wrong.
He has no scars.
His skin is as clear and unblemished as it was on the day he first joined the Archives. There are no pockmarks marring his arms. His face is smooth and unmarked. He looks young, and free, and untroubled... except for his eyes. His eyes carry the shadows of what he has seen.
"What do you want from me?" he mutters darkly, to nothing and to everything. To whatever might be listening.
There's no response. He doesn't expect one, but he waits anyway, holding his breath, waiting for something to happen. When it doesn't, he nods, slowly.
"Okay," he says quietly. "So it's going to be like that, is it?"
He can play this game. He has been playing this game for longer than he cares to acknowledge, constantly on the lookout for whatever may be hiding, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
If his bedroom is the same as he remembers, it stands to reason that the rest of his flat will be, as well. And-
He creeps over to the window, pressing himself to the wall beside it and twitching the curtains open to peer outside.
The world looks normal, and untroubled. Just an average London morning, with the city waking up around him. A curl of deeper unease settles in Tim's stomach. If whatever this is - whatever's happening to him - is powerful enough to cast an illusion of the entire city, then he is very much in danger, indeed.
He needs to make a plan. He needs to find somewhere to start.
And so, Tim closes his curtains once more, and starts getting ready for work. One way or another, no matter how much he hates the place, he is sure that answers can be found in the Archives.
~~~~~
His commute is... normal. Frighteningly so. The same press of harried fellow travelers, the same stale and stifling air in the Underground. The Institute itself stands unchanged when he finally arrives, and no matter how sharp a look he shoots Rosie when he passes the front desk, her customer-service smile remains fixed and unwavering.
The stairs to the Archives are unlocked already. Jon, he thinks, when he turns the handle on the door, and then: no, it can't be. Jon was right next to me in the explosion. Jon is dead.
The grief that comes with that thought is unexpected, and makes Tim pause, faltering on the stairs as he processes it. He doesn't...
He's not friends with Jon, not anymore. He hasn't been for a long time. But they were friends, once, and... Tim supposes, in the quiet, regretful way of a realization that has come too late, that no matter how much he had hated Jon at the end... he had still cared for him, too. Enough to not wish him dead, at least.
It is too late for such thoughts, though, so Tim shakes his head and continues down the stairs, keeping his footsteps light. Someone is down here already, and he doesn't want to alert them to his presence any sooner than necessary.
He tries the door to Jon's office as he passes, just in case, and nods to himself when it doesn't budge. Still locked. He proceeds to the assistants' office.
The lights are on. Tim frowns when he sees the three desks: his own, Martin's, and... the other one. It doesn't have enough clutter on it to be Melanie's, but... but the things that are on it shouldn't be on it, because he had cleared it out after Sasha died. The fact that her things are here, again… he’d say it doesn’t make sense, but it does, of course. Of course they are back, because their presence hurts him, and he is only here to be hurt, after all.
He ignores it for the moment, stalking over to his own desk. The sight of it gives him pause. It, too, isn't how he left it.
There's a plant sitting on the corner. A little succulent, no more than three inches high. He distinctly remembers throwing it in the garbage after Prentiss's worms carved holes in its leaves.
Tim's heart is beating hard in his chest as he throws his laptop open, hesitating for just a moment over the keys before he types in his password - his old password, the one he changed after Jon went into his paranoid spiral and tried to snoop on Tim's personal files. He's breathing fast.
He stops breathing entirely as the little calendar in the corner of his screen cheerfully informs him that it is 2015.
No.
Tim can’t- he doesn’t-
His email program loads automatically, presenting him with the first item in his inbox.
Tim,
You mentioned before that you had seen a tape recorder in one of the storage rooms, correct? When you have time tomorrow please find it again and bring it to my office along with any blank tapes you can find. I’d like to try using it to record some of the more difficult statements we’ve found.
Best,
Jon
He remembers this day: late October, shortly after they'd first moved to the Archives. Everything had still been awkward and fresh, settling into new roles and the new dynamic of having Jon as their boss. Tim braces one hand against his desk for balance, reeling as all the little details start to add up and click into place.
His scars, Sasha’s desk, the plant…
It’s not that anything is wrong, per say, in what he has seen today. It’s just outdated.
But why would the Circus try to trick him into thinking he was back when the world still made sense?
“Morning, Tim,” a voice says, and his head snaps up from his laptop to see who has joined him in the room. “Everything alright?”
It can’t be. It can’t. The woman in front of him walks over to Sasha’s desk and sets a mug of tea down, giving him a cheerful smile. She has long hair, and big glasses, and she looks nothing like anyone Tim remembers. Her voice is faintly familiar, in the way of one he has heard off an old cassette tape exactly once before realizing he couldn’t bear to listen any longer.
“Sasha,” he chokes out, feeling the catch in his own voice, and believes. For once - for once - something good has happened to him. This isn’t some illusion or trick of the Circus - it wouldn’t be kind enough to give her back. Somehow, some way, Tim has traveled back in time, and now he has a second chance. To save her, to make things right.
He is across the room in an instant, engulfing her in a crushing hug, and Sasha - Sasha - lets out a small oof of discomfort before returning it. It’s warm, and fond, and real, and Tim has to bite his lip hard to stop himself crying. He never thought he’d get to have this again, but he can’t bring himself to tell her how much it hurts. She deserves to live untroubled by the shadows of his past.
“Hi,” she says, sounding faintly amused at the display. “Long night?”
“The longest,” he says into her shoulder. So many long nights have passed since he saw her last, and to have her here, again, safe and happy- “How are you?” he asks, because he needs to hear it.
Her arms tighten a little. “I’m fine,” she says gently, and Tim knows he is acting strange, that she knows something is wrong and is trying to comfort him, and even though he wishes she wouldn’t he can’t help but be grateful for it, a little. “How are you?”
He can’t tell her the truth. He doesn’t think he has the words to tell her the truth, even if he wanted to. So instead he shrugs, and says: “Meh. Just… one of those days, you know?” and hopes it’s enough.
It is.
"Take the day off if you need it, yeah?" Sasha says, and Tim can’t help but laugh at that. He’d take the day off if she came with him, but somehow he doubts she’d be willing to blow off work. She’s always been dedicated.
His gaze is caught by her eyes as he pulls back from the hug, pausing with his hands on her shoulders. Her eyes are a deep brown, with small flecks of green in them. He remembers them blue.
There is so much he doesn’t know about the person in front of him, Tim realizes, but even with that he’s filled with an immense fondness when he looks at her. It catches him off-guard, lowering his defenses, and so, before he can stop himself, he says: "You're my best friend, you know that, right? I don't know if I've ever told you."
Thankfully, she doesn’t seem to notice anything odd in him expressing such a sentiment. “You’re mine too,” she replies, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
He pulls himself together. If he continues in this vein he’s going to end up doing something rash like telling Sasha he’s missed her, and he doesn’t think that will end well vis-à-vis his plan to not tell her about the future.
With this in mind Tim finally lets go of her, and gives a brisk nod. “I'll be fine today,” he says. “But thanks.”
“Of course,” she says with a smile, and starts walking backward toward her desk. “If you're staying though we should probably get to work. Can't imagine Jon'll be too much later than this.”
“Right,” Tim says, thrown with the reminder that he’s back in a normal office job. He’s spent so long, by now, doing everything he can to avoid working for the evil Eye god that runs this place that he’s not entirely sure how he’s supposed to handle going back to it. “Right,” he repeats, trying to think of something normal to say and landing on the email he had seen. “Yeah, he wanted me to-”
And then Jon walks in.
For a moment, Tim is overcome with the familiar hatred that has become second nature to him in recent memory. But then he actually looks at Jon, and his heart softens.
The man in front of him looks… young. Not in any obvious way, he still has greying hair and a fashion sense more suited to a grandmother than a twenty-something academic. But in the way he carries himself, in the openness on his face. Tim has grown so used to the paranoid sharpness of a Jon that has been through hell, that he had forgotten just how uncertain he once had been. Tim can see the exact moment when Jon notices him, can see the way his walls come up as he shifts into his professional mode, and he’s not sure he’s ever known, before, just how false the mask Jon wears is.
"Tim, Sasha," he says. "You're- good morning."
That stutter: that’s nerves. How had he never noticed before? Jon has no more clue of what he is walking into with this job than Tim had, way back when.
"Morning, Jon," Sasha says, and then ignores him in favor of turning on her laptop.
Tim has to say something. He has to. He should comment on the latest case he has been working on, that was a normal thing to greet Jon with if he remembers correctly, but he has no idea what he might be researching at the moment. It’s been years, after all, since he’s seen it. "I got your email," he settles on, although it is the last thing he wants to discuss. "About the tape recorder?" In hindsight, he hates that it was him that first suggested using it.
“Ah.” Jon says. He looks thrown, as though he wasn’t expecting Tim to mention it. To be fair, Tim hadn’t checked the timestamp on that email: knowing Jon, it might have been sent in an overtired daze at 2 a.m. and then promptly forgotten. “W-what about it?”
Tim doesn’t know what about it, except to perhaps tell Jon he’s going to smash it at the first opportunity. He doesn’t think that’ll go over well, though. “I, um, wanted to ask,” he begins, not sure how he’s going to finish the sentence until he gets there. “I’ll bring it to your office later, once I find it, but… if I don’t find any tapes with it, do you want me to run out and buy some?” Passable. Believable. He almost sounds like he meant to say it all along.
“Oh!” Jon says, something almost relieved passing over his expression. “You haven’t found it yet…” Tim is about to interject with of course not, I only just got the email, when Jon continues. “Actually, Tim,” he says, sounding brisk. “I’ve been rethinking the whole tape recorder idea.”
“Have you?” Tim says, surprised. That’s… new.
“Yes.” Jon nods decisively. “I know I’ve been insistent on getting audio recordings of every statement, but it occurred to me on the way here that having tapes isn’t exactly conducive to building an accessible and modernized Archive. Indeed, I think it might be an entirely useless drain on our time and resources, especially if we find a better method to record the difficult statements in the future. It’s probably for the best if we just continue setting them to the side for now, and mark it as a problem to deal with later, once we have some level of organization established around the rest of this place.”
It’s a very Jon speech, and Tim can’t deny that he’s glad Jon won’t be recording the ‘difficult’ - real - statements this time around. He remembers the effect they had had on him in the past… or future, depending on how he looked at it. It did raise a troubling question, though: had Jon had these doubts the first time, too? Had he only gone ahead with the tape recordings because Tim had cheerfully dropped the device on his desk without a thought for the consequences?
He sets the thought aside for later in favor of giving Jon a bright smile. “Sounds good to me, boss! Can’t say I was really looking forward to digging through all these dusty old rooms trying to find it again.”
“Good, good,” Jon says. “In that case I will leave you to get on with your normal work, then, and… just delete that email, will you?”
“Sure thing,” Tim replies, and only manages a single step toward his desk before the door swings open again.
This arrival, he knows how to handle. His interactions with Martin haven’t changed terribly much over the years, give or take a degree of friendliness or two. “Hey, Martin,” he says, with a grin and a nod in his direction. Martin shoots him a wild look, frazzled by being the last one in the office. He’s hardly that late, but Tim’s not going to begrudge him his anxiety.
He looks back to Jon almost immediately, mouth already shaping words that are sure to be either apologies or promises to be more on time in the future, and Tim shakes his head in amusement as he finally settles down behind his desk. Jon had completely forgotten him as soon as Martin walked in the room, too.
That certainly hadn’t changed over the years. Those two were always focused on each other to the exclusion of all else, no matter how much they denied it. Tim’s not sure when Martin’s feelings slipped over into a crush, but from the flush in his cheeks it looks like it was earlier than today. He knows Jon’s focus is just a matter of irritation for now, but it’s amusing to know how protective he will become of Martin, if given the opportunity.
Not that he will get that opportunity, if Tim has any say in the matter. It’s months yet before Prentiss will make her first appearance, but Tim is more than ready to charge in, fire extinguisher at the ready, when it happens. For now, though, he does a quick skim through his recent emails and the documents on his computer to refresh his memory of what was going on in the Archives at present, before deciding that all of that can wait and switching the focus of his research.
He never actually visited Gertrude’s storage unit, the first time around, but he knows of its existence and he knows the key is under the loose floorboard in Jon’s office. He’s confident that he will be able to find it.
Tim barely notices as the office quiets down around him and everyone settles into their tasks, too focused on his own research into subjects that are sure to get him onto several government watchlists. He can live with that. He hadn’t expected to live at all, so he can certainly live with his browser being tracked. He needs to learn how to set off plastic explosives, after all.
He has a Circus to take down.
Jon
Jon wakes up with the lingering taste of copper in his mouth.
Before he has a chance to process anything about the situation he is in, he is hit with the sudden and certain knowledge that he is in the past. The 18th of October, 2015, to be precise. He’s got just a moment to process the bitter irony of that date before something deep in his mind goes dark, with the finality of a door slamming in his face.
His eyes fly open with a gasp at the helpless, confined feeling of being cut off from the Eye. “Martin,” he breathes, because if he is lost he knows he can always rely on Martin to guide him home.
He’s in his flat. His old flat, the one he’d abandoned after he went on the run from the police. Martin is not with him.
“Oh god,” Jon says.
Martin is not with him.
And he is in the past.
And if he came back to the past and Martin is not with him-
The sob that chokes its way out of his throat should probably hurt more, he thinks, in some quiet, disconnected corner of his brain that remains free of the overwhelming grief wracking the rest of him. Given that he was just stabbed, and all that.
He’d only done it for Martin. He’d done it to save Martin, because he could not bear the thought of losing him. And now-
“I’m sorry,” Jon says, though there is no breath behind it so he may as well simply be shaping the words with his lips. “Martin, Martin, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please come back, please, I love you, please…”
Time slips away from him, and he is not sure how long he spends there, curled up in a painful ball amidst the sheets of a bed he never intended to see again. All he knows is that eventually his body can produce no more tears, and he’s left clutching at a pain in his heart far greater than any knife could inflict and repeating a broken litany of Martin’s name.
He considers, for a moment, whether he will be able to kill himself now that he is free from the Eye. That had been the plan, after all: give Martin the knife, and make damn sure that if Martin died, Jon went with him. It’s an alluring idea.
It is also incredibly selfish, and it is this thought that stays his hand.
He had planned to die when faced with the prospect of a world without Martin in it. But… there is a Martin in this world. A younger Martin, to be sure: not the man Jon has grown to love, not the person he has followed across hell in the faint hope of being able to save it, but Martin nonetheless. And, one way or another, Jon has to protect him.
And the rest of the world as well, obviously. But it is the thought of saving Martin - any version of Martin - that gives Jon the motivation to finally sit up and throw off his sheets, and take stock of the room around him.
It is just as he remembers it. Bare walls. A bookshelf against one of them. A pile of papers on his bedside table, with his laptop set on the floor next to that, from many long nights spent working until he passed out from exhaustion. He can feel that heavy tiredness weighing on him now, and he’s not sure if it’s due to his body not having slept enough, or his mind being cut off from the Eye.
There’s a mirror on the wall opposite the bookshelf. He is hesitant to approach it; he has not looked at his own face for a long, long time. He has already seen that his hands do not bear the scars they once did, however, and curiosity gets the better of him all too soon.
All his scars are gone. All… save one. It is an inhuman noise of grief that chokes its way out of Jon’s throat when he sees the mark over his heart, that single, clean scar from where the knife pressed in. Every other mark has been erased from his skin, every trace of the horrors that have tormented him for so long, but that one scar remains.
He thinks he should probably be horrified by it. Instead, Jon presses one hand over the mark on his chest and uses his other to muffle the pained whimpers that slip from him as his knees give out and he hits the floor, crying again.
Martin.
He has something, at least. Some memento of the man he loves, something he can cling to against the tide of time and defy anyone to say that what they had is gone. It will never be gone, not as long as Jon lives. He will carry Martin’s memory for the rest of his life; he will live for him, push on for him, fight back against the darkness in the world with all the strength in his body and maybe, maybe this time he will be able to save it. For him.
By the time Jon finally manages to drag himself into work clothes and stumble out the door; by the time he has doubled back for his phone, his keys, his wallet, all of the things he never thought he would need to remember again; by the time he has forced himself out into the crowds of people that he knows he will doom - has doomed - may doom again; he can feel dehydration scratching at his throat from how many tears he has shed. He tries very hard not to think about how much he wants Martin to make him a cup of tea, and to hold his hands and promise that it will all turn out okay.
~~~~~
He feels the Eye pressing down on him as soon as he enters the front doors of the Institute, and it takes all the restraint he has to not turn around and run from it. Or, possibly, to breathe a sigh of relief at the familiar sensation. He does not want to think about that second instinct, or what it might mean.
Rosie sits at her post as unchanging as she has ever been, a fixed point in the world, and he takes a moment to wish her good morning as he passes on the way to the Archives. She looks startled that he has acknowledged her, and he feels a brief burn of shame that he has never done so before. But then, that’s why Jonah chose her, isn’t it? She fades into the background, unseen yet seeing all.
The Archives are already unlocked when he reaches the door, which is a bit of a relief since he doesn’t remember which of his keys goes with it. It also means that someone is here already, and Jon feels tension building in his shoulders with each step he takes down the stairs. He can’t burst into tears when he sees Martin. He can’t, he can’t to that to either of them, he’s going to carry his grief alone and not burden Martin with the memories of a man who he now will never be-
It’s not Martin.
"Tim, Sasha," he says, stunned. "You're-” alive. They’re alive, Tim and a woman he doesn’t recognize who must be Sasha, they’re here, and how the hell had Jon not considered the fact that they would be? He’s been so caught up in his grief over losing Martin that he’d completely forgotten that there were other friends alive in 2015 that he will have to face seeing again. “...Good morning,” he finishes instead, hoping against hope that he’s managed to school his face into something resembling the professional coolness he used to wear so well.
“Morning, Jon,” the woman says, and it’s Sasha’s voice, so it must really be her. Jon tries not to stare too openly as she walks over to her desk to boot up her laptop, trying to memorize her features as well as he can without being obvious about it. Sasha is tall, with long hair and glasses, just as Melanie had told him. She also has freckles, and he cannot believe that he had forgotten that about her.
Tim speaks from right next to him, and Jon suppresses a jump with a massive effort of will. He hadn’t heard him approach. “I got your email. About the tape recorder?”
It is friendly, and casual, and Jon doesn’t know what to do with it. His instincts tell him to expect a trap - Tim and tape recorders are not a good combination - but he also knows, logically, that they were friends once. He wishes he remembered how to be friends again. “Ah,” he says, stalling for time, because he also just doesn’t remember that email and can’t really hold a conversation about it. “W-what about it?”
“I, um, wanted to ask,” Tim says. “I’ll bring it to your office later, once I find it, but…” He taps the fingers of one hand against his opposite arm, a tick of his that Jon had forgotten. God, Jon had forgotten. He’s not surprised that he forgot details about Sasha, but Tim? He’d only been gone just over a year, and already his memory was fading. Jon bites his lip to hold back tears as Tim finishes his question. “If I don’t find any tapes with it, do you want me to run out and buy some?”
“Oh!” The noise of surprise is involuntary, and Jon quickly tries to choke it back. Now he knows what email Tim is referring to: the one Jon had sent on the night he finally snapped, throwing in the towel on getting digital recordings of the real statements and submitting himself to the hassle and humiliation of going analogue. Had that really been the 18th of October? The coincidence - if it can be called such - is a bitter one, and he spends a moment cursing the machinations of the Web until the implications of what Tim had said fully sink in. “You haven’t found it yet…” Jon breathes, and then, before Tim can respond: “Actually, Tim, I’ve been rethinking the whole tape recorder idea.”
“Have you?” Tim’s eyebrows climb up his forehead in surprise.
“Yes,” Jon says decisively. If he can get ahead of this… stop the tapes before the Web has a chance to get its hooks in the Archives… He doesn’t know if the Fears were released from this reality when the Panopticon exploded or if they, like he, have been dragged back to the beginning, but if there’s any chance he can thwart the Web’s plan this time around before it even gets close to the apocalypse, he’s going to take it. He just needs a way to justify the change in mindset.
With this in mind, he starts rambling on what he desperately hopes is an at least semi-coherent rant about archival practices. “I know I’ve been insistent on getting audio recordings of every statement, but it occurred to me on the way here that having tapes isn’t exactly conducive to building an accessible and modernized Archive. Indeed, I think it might be an entirely useless drain on our time and resources, especially if we find a better method to record the difficult statements in the future. It’s probably for the best if we just continue setting them to the side for now, and mark it as a problem to deal with later, once we have some level of organization established around the rest of this place.”
Tim’s eyes have glazed over by the time Jon is halfway through, and he counts it as a win. Tim gives a bright smile when he finally stops talking. “Sounds good to me, boss! Can’t say I was really looking forward to digging through all these dusty old rooms trying to find it again.”
God, he’d missed the old Tim. The Tim who still had hope, and was willing to look on the bright side of things no matter the situation. “Good, good,” Jon says, trying to not drown in nostalgia. “In that case I will leave you to get on with your normal work, then, and…” He hesitates for a second, debating over whether his next sentence will raise unwanted questions, then decides to go for it anyway. “Just delete that email, will you?” He doesn’t want to leave even the slightest mention of tape recorders lying around.
“Sure thing,” Tim replies with a thumbs-up, and takes a step back toward his desk. Jon has just begun to breathe a quiet sigh of relief that he will now be able to escape to his office to begin processing everything that has happened, when the door swings open behind him.
“Hey, Martin,” Tim says, and Jon’s heart stops in his chest.
He doesn’t actually feel the motion as he turns around. He might black out for a second. All he knows is that he is facing the door now, and in the door Martin is standing. He looks… good. He looks really good.
He’s staring back at Jon, eyes wide and mouth slightly open in preparation to talk. His hair is a bit disheveled, a pink tinge high on his cheeks from his hurry to arrive on time. He looks well-rested. Healthy. The lines of stress and sorrow that Jon has grown used to seeing on his face are gone.
“Jon,” he says, and for a moment, just a moment, Jon allows himself to hope that Martin has come back with him after all, and that he is about to throw himself into Jon’s arms and declare his relief that they have both made it.
“Martin,” he says, taking a small step forward-
“I- I’m sorry I’m late,” Martin says, and the hope freezes in his chest.
“Oh.” There is so much despair in that one syllable. So much resignation. It feels like a long, long time before he is able to bring himself to speak again, but Martin doesn’t interject so perhaps it is only a moment. “Y-you’re not late,” he finally says, and he knows his voice sounds flat and disappointed but he doesn’t have any energy to alleviate it. “I’ve only just got in myself.”
Martin swallows, and Jon hates how nervous he looks. Had he really been so cruel, before, that Martin is actively scared of him? Even in the deepest depths of his monstrosity Martin had never looked at him with anything but trust. How could he have been so much worse when he was fully human?
“R-right,” Martin says. Jon can see the nails of one hand digging into his palm where he has clenched his fist, and he longs to reach out and soothe the tension with the gentle press of his own hand. But he can’t. He never will be able to again, he’ll never be that person for Martin again, because his heart will always lay with a version of him that no longer exists. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them.
But oh, how he wants to.
“Right,” he echoes. “S-so-” How are you? he wants to ask. How’s your mum? Are you writing poetry again yet, or did that not start for another few months? Do you still have that ficus in your kitchen? I remember you were so upset that it died while you were living in the Archives. He can’t do that either, though. That would raise far too many red flags about his behavior, seem far too out of character. “So there’s no need to apologize,” he says instead, and hopes it doesn’t sound too odd.
“Thanks,” Martin says. He seems a little thrown by the comment, but not to a worrying extent. Even so, Jon thinks it’s best if he exits this conversation as soon as possible. For the sake of his own heart, if nothing else.
“Right,” he says again. “So I’ll, uh… I’ll be heading to my office now, then.”
“Right,” Martin echoes him this time. “Yeah, and I’ll… tea.”
Tea. Jon loves him so much he feels like his heart might explode with it.
“Right,” he says for a third and final time, and turns to leave before he starts crying in front of everyone. That might take a little more explaining than he’s prepared to do at the moment.
Thankfully the door to his office is back in the hallway, so no one can see him trying various keys in the lock until he finds the one that fits. When he gets inside he shuts the door again behind himself, leaning back against it for a moment as he takes in the familiar chaos of the room he spent the worst years of his life in. It’s the room he made his best friends in too, though. The room he fell in love in.
Jon allows himself ten minutes, and ten minutes only, to cry. After that he forces composure onto himself, swiping at his eyes with a tissue until they stay dry. Then he opens his laptop, finds a home improvement store that takes online orders, and buys as many CO2 fire extinguishers as he can without breaking the bank.
There are other things he has to do as well, of course. Other people he has to save. But first things come first, and after he finishes his order of extinguishers he begins plotting how to keep Martin as far away from Carlos Vittery’s apartment as possible without raising suspicions.
He will keep Martin safe. Whatever it takes.
Martin
Martin wakes up alone.
That is his first thought: I am alone.
His second, following close on its heels, is: I am alive.
The next is far more complex and coherent. If I am alive, and I am alone, then Jon is dead.
The logical follow up to that, I've killed Jon, is far too painful to think in so many words, and arrives instead as a formless wave of grief and guilt and anguish strong enough to knock him unconscious once again.
~~~~~
The next time he wakes, he registers his surroundings. He is in his flat - the old one, the one he’d abandoned after Prentiss trapped him there for thirteen days. His phone - the old one, the one that she had stolen - is sitting on his bedside table, and when he taps at the screen to wake it up he can see the date blinking up at him:
18 October, 2015.
Oh, the irony.
He sits up, slowly. He feels rested, and refreshed, and healthy. He’s pretty sure he knows what has happened: Jon had said they might go somewhere else, after all, and Anya Villette had found herself tossed back in time when she fell through the rift in Hill Top Road.
So he is in another dimension, taking the place of whatever Martin Blackwood had lived here before him. He wonders if this Martin also works for the Magnus Institute, or if the building never existed because there were no Fears to necessitate it. They’ll be here now, of course, so maybe some similar institution will be founded soon.
Martin very calmly extricates himself from his sheets, shivering slightly when his feet land on the cold hardwood floor. It does not deter him, though, and he makes his way out of the bedroom and down the familiar hallway to his kitchen. Everything is just as he remembers it, and he does not hesitate over where to find the large chef’s knife that he is seeking.
He frees it from its drawer, testing the sharpness of its point against his fingertip. It’ll do.
Martin lines up the blade over his heart, finding the space between two ribs where it will go in easily, and prepares to drive it home.
He is stopped by the sight of a picture taped over his sink, and he lowers the blade gingerly. The very tip of it is bloody, and his chest is stinging with pain, but he ignores both of these things in favor of stepping over to peer at the photo.
He recognizes it. Tim, Jon, and a woman who must be Sasha, Jon pinned between the other two and looking disgruntled about it while Tim holds the camera out of frame to take the picture. Sasha had sent it to him in their first week in the Archives, part of a larger conversation where she explained to him that Jon was always a tad grumpy, and it wasn’t Martin’s fault that his new boss seemed to hate him so much. Martin had gotten the picture printed anyway, and taped it over his sink to remind himself of the people he hoped might someday be his friends.
They exist in this dimension then, or a version of them at least. He exists.
Whatever numb wall had come up between Martin and his emotions shatters, and his knees hit the floor in a painful collision as he collapses under the weight of his despair. He thinks he might be sobbing. Possibly screaming.
Jon is gone, and Martin can’t follow him.
Not when he knows there is another Jon out there who needs him. Not when he knows it is his fault the Fears are in this reality, and he has to do whatever he can to mitigate the damage they cause. Jon had released the Fears to save him, and Martin can’t repay that sacrifice by letting them spread unchecked.
No. Jon had died to save him. He had saved Martin’s life at the expense of his own, and wasn’t that just the most Jon thing he could have done?
Martin is distantly aware of his body, the way he is hunched over with his hands clenched around his shoulders, nails digging in hard enough to break skin. His knees are throbbing, sure to bruise. His chest stings, and he can feel the warm dampness of blood spreading from the small cut he had inflicted.
None of it matters. Nothing matters.
Jon matters.
His throat is ragged and raw by the time his grief quiets into an aching silence. He swipes, uselessly, at eyes still overflowing with tears, and picks himself carefully up off the floor. He drops the knife into the sink to deal with later; presses two fingers against the picture on the wall.
“I will save you,” Martin vows, staring at that small image of the man he loves. “This time, I’ll save you.”
He is careful to clean the blood from his skin before he dresses; careful to stick plasters over the cuts so no one knows that anything is wrong. It’s a mask he is comfortable wearing: he’s spent most of his life pretending nothing is wrong, after all. He knows how to clean the evidence of tears from his face, keeps a stash of lozenges to soothe the roughness of sobs from his throat.
By the time Martin leaves his flat, rushing a bit because he knows he’s late, no one would ever be able to tell how much pain he is in, or that his entire world has been so recently ended by the death of a single man.
~~~~~
The Institute exists. Martin’s not sure if he should be relieved by that or not. It could mean that this universe has had its own Fears for just as long as the one he came from, and the choices he and Jon made did not, in fact, doom it. On the other hand, it could mean that the Fears have defied all logic of time and shown up even further in the past than he has, and that what they did in the Panopticon doomed its entire history, and not just the point from the present forward.
It doesn’t affect the choices Martin will make from this point on, but he is curious to know the exact measure of his guilt.
Either way, it is too immense to put words to. If he hadn’t told the others to go early, if he’d taken more time to talk things over with Jon before deciding on a plan… Jon’s death is on his hands, and for more reasons than that he was the one to wield the knife.
Rosie sits behind her desk as she always has, a pleasant smile on her face, and Martin has a vivid flashback to the rictus grin she had borne in the Panopticon. She’d fled past him down the stairs as he was racing up to find Jon. He hopes she made it out okay.
Here, though, he simply returns the polite smile and hurries past her to the Archives. He has work to be getting on with.
All thoughts of work fly out of his head the second he pushes through the door of the assistants’ office. It is… so, so familiar. Sasha, or a woman who must be Sasha, bending over her laptop; Tim standing in the middle of the room, chatting with-
Martin barely hears Tim’s friendly greeting, too focused on the man he had been talking to as Jon turns around on the spot with a faintly startled look on his face.
He looks so young.
His face is unlined and unscarred. His eyes have widened slightly, in the way Martin normally thinks of as vulnerability but here must be simply surprise. He’s standing straight, not hunched over by the weight of his past like Martin has grown so familiar with during their trek through the apocalypse.
He looks so much like the Jon Martin knew that he finds himself struggling for a moment to believe that they are not, in fact, the same man.
“Jon,” he says, heart faltering in his chest, and Jon takes a step forward and says “Martin,” all breathless and fond in the way Martin never thought he’d hear again, and hope balloons in Martin’s chest that this might be his Jon, after all, and that they came here together even if they arrived separately.
“I- I’m sorry I’m late,” Martin says, nonsensically. It’s the sort of horrible one-liner you’d run into in a rom-com, the love interest dashing in on a horse to meet the main character at the rendezvous just as they were about to give up and leave. This would be an appropriate climax for a romance movie, he thinks.
And then Jon stops his forward motion, and says. “Oh. Y- you’re not late,” in the flat, vaguely disinterested tone he only uses for things he truly does not care about, and Martin’s heart shatters in his chest for the millionth time since he woke up. “I’ve only just got in myself,” Jon adds.
Except he’s not Jon, is he? Not- not that he’s Not!Jon, not that he’s an imposter or anything like that, but… he’s not Martin’s Jon. He never has been, and he never will be. Martin’s Jon died in his arms, at his hand, and he will never, ever come back.
Martin swallows, hard, to try and fend off the lump he can feel rising in his throat and the tears he knows will follow it. He’s not sure what his face is doing, but it can’t be good judging by the little troubled furrow that has appeared between Jon’s brows. He aches to smooth it away as he has done so many times in the past, to press his lips to the wrinkled skin until it eases into a smile, but he knows he cannot, and he never will be able to again.
“R-right,” he says, just to say something, to fend off whatever questions Jon might be preparing to ask.
“Right,” Jon echoes, and then, surprisingly, continues. “S- so. So there’s no need to apologize.”
“Thanks,” Martin says, thrown. He doesn’t think Jon ever told him not to apologize, this early in their own timeline. Perhaps that is one of the differences between this dimension and his own, or perhaps - and he feels extremely guilty as soon as he thinks this - perhaps he has simply been uncharitable to Jon in his memories, and he was far kinder when they first met than Martin has been giving him credit for.
“Right,” Jon says again, nodding briskly, and the moment is over. “So I’ll, uh… I’ll be heading to my office now, then.”
Oh. Oh, that was why he had taken a step forward earlier. Martin is between him and the door, and he had just been trying to leave the room.
“Right,” Martin says, and is startled by how much embarrassment he can still feel over a simple misunderstanding even in the midst of all his other emotional chaos. “Yeah, and I’ll…” He reaches for something normal, something inconsequential that might have been a daily task of his three years ago, and comes up with nothing. If he’d thought he was bad at his job before, it’ll be nothing compared to how horrendous he’s going to be now he doesn’t even know what cases he’s supposed to be working on. “...Tea,” he finishes lamely, because that’s the one unchanging constant he knows he’s always had in life.
“Right,” Jon says, and then brushes past him out of the room without a backward glance.
Ouch. That hurts, much as Martin wishes it didn’t. It’s one thing to be slighted by a boss you barely know, quite another to be slighted by a man who bears the face of the one you love.
He cannot deal with facing this world’s versions of Tim and Sasha right now. He just can’t.
Martin beats a hasty retreat to the breakroom, closing the door behind him. No one is likely to come this way for a long time, and no one is likely to miss him if he disappears for a bit. In the scant privacy the shared space grants him, he allows himself to cry.
Then he wipes his eyes, makes himself a cup of tea, and returns to his desk, carefully blocking out his awareness of the people and the world around him. It’s a trick he learned when he was working with Peter, and though it may not be healthy, it certainly makes it easier to focus on his work.
He ignores the case files on his desk, choosing instead to do his own research. He has a world to save, after all.
So: the Web, and Jonah Magnus, and how to stop them both without harming anyone who works for the Institute. More specifically, without hurting Jon.
Martin puts his head down, and gets to work.