Chapter Text
The Archives were burning, and their Archivist with them, the flame lapping greedily beneath his skin. It was agony. But there was no time for him to pay attention to that.
Around them, the nightmare universe that the Fears had created was crumbling, unreality buckling beneath its own weight.
“Cut the tether,” begged Jon, from his position at the centre of it all, the throne of a ruined world. “Send them away.”
In the unholy, all-revealing glow of the Eye that glared around every facet of the Panopticon’s observation chamber, the horror and confusion on Martin’s face was illuminated all too clearly.
“Maybe we both die,” Jon continued, increasingly frantic, warming to his theme. “Probably. But maybe not, maybe, m-maybe everything works out, and we end up Somewhere Else.”
For a split second Martin struggled for words, his mouth forming soundless shapes as his mind raced. He could probably barely see through tears, Jon realised. Jon didn’t have that luxury anymore: he saw everything , all at once, forever, whether he wanted it or not.
“Together?” asked Martin, voice full of trepidation. He was clutching the knife in his hands like a lifeline.
As best he could through the pain, Jon nodded.
“One way or another,” he promised. “Together.”
Martin steeled himself, straightened his back, adjusted the knife in his hand. Jon tipped his chin back and waited; the thought of dying was relief, now, not fear. But at the thought of the actual physicality of the action - the blade sliding between Jon’s ribs, the force that he would need to do it, the idea of standing there and watching the light fade from Jon’s eyes and it being his fault - Martin faltered, new, panicked sobs choking back his words.
“I don’t think I can-”
“It has to be you,” Jon insisted, truly desperate now. They were running out of time. Martin was the only person here still free to move, not entrapped within the machinations of a dread god. “The Eye won’t let me do it.”
Swallowing down his tears, Martin stepped closer; they could have been embracing, in another place, another life, noses almost touching. His entire face was twisted up in terror.
“Are you sure about this?”
Jon swallowed hard.
“No,” he admitted, a hint of hysterical laughter colouring the words. He braced himself. “But I love you.”
“I love you too.” said Martin, soft voice almost breaking.
They kissed: a fleeting, hurried thing.
Martin pushed the knife into Jon’s heart.
Distantly, Jon was aware that Martin was crying, holding his body close as it went limp, but he couldn’t feel it: there was blinding pain, there was the instinctive panic of breathlessness as all the air rushed out of his lungs, there was sudden, shocked cold spreading across his body, and then -
Jon felt himself unwind, the fabric of his being unspool from its physical vessel like magnetic tape pulled from a cassette. Time and space drifted away: he existed as nothing more than faint strands of human consciousness and the remnant power of the awful, ever-present Eye. The Ceaseless Watcher observed the hell it had created fall apart, just as ravenously as it had gazed over its many torments - but what was left of Jon was once again free enough to think his own thoughts.
He was caught within the Web itself, the infinite, geometric strands of purpose and paranoia that had secretly held this place together. Suspended like that between universes, Jon could see forward and backward in time all at once: every capability, every intention, every intricacy was revealed to him, what they planned to do to the hapless victims of their new dimension, how they planned to manipulate the other Fears next.
On nothing more than instinct, Jon heard himself say, without physical throat or voice to form the word,
“No .”
The Web around him vibrated with victorious laughter.
“No, ” Jon muttered again, his unnatural vision filled with premonitions on what the Web meant to do with him, where it would send them. He found that he was not afraid: he was beyond that, he was numb. “Not that. Send me back. ”
At that, the Mother of Puppets seemed to reconsider, almost surprised. It did not speak, any more than Jon had spoken - but in his head, he heard its words in Annabelle Cane’s voice.
“You can’t change anything ,” it informed him, not quite triumphant; merely stating a fact. “There’s no way to undo what has been done. This version of reality is gone forever, ours forever. We will always have won. The Fears will always be released in every direction from this point in time. ”
It was true, but he couldn’t accept it.
“Let me try again, let me make it stop, ” Jon pleaded. He was not in his right mind; his consciousness itself was little more than emotion, and at that moment he was all guilt, regret, and barely anything else.
The Spider mulled over his request, examining him like an entrapped fly that it meant to consume.
“There is another timeline that can be yours to play with, ” offered the voice that was not Annabelle, light and mocking. “ Yours to divert as you wish. Nothing can change this ending. But you can forge a new beginning. ”
“Yes ,” gasped Jon gratefully. “Yes, that. ”
“What a wonderful gift for the Mother of Puppets, ” it teased him. “An attempt to manipulate an entire universe toward a better shape. ”
“I made so many mistakes, ” he whispered, more to himself than to the Spider. “So many choices made in ignorance, in selfishness. I have to try and do better, please. ”
“Where? ”
The Web moved around him, stretching time along with it: he saw himself as a baby, a child, a young boy with a heavy frown reading an evil cardbook picture book, staring glumly out of a window in high school, up late revising at university, walking out of his job interview at the Magnus Institute with his shoulders still tense with nerves, stiff and unsure on his first day as Archivist, bleeding and trapped in Artefact Storage on the day of Jane Prentiss’s assault on the Archives. No, no, no, he thought, mentally turning away from each one. All wrong.
The world was set on the path to its destruction too long ago, and not entirely by him. Gertrude Robinson had uncovered the keys, in her own futile, brutal attempts to prevent that very outcome, and Jonah Magnus had engineered the end. He needed to go further back than that to fix it. All the way back to the start.
“As you wish ,” agreed the Spider, faux-sweetly.
That should have pleased him, but something was wrong, something that snagged on Jon’s mind with the urgency of a grasping hand.
Where you go, I go, came Martin’s voice in Jon’s memory, scared and certain of nothing but those words, and full of love.
“Martin, too,” he demanded impulsively, with the last of the power that he had over this dying unreality, still strung up in the timeless membrane between worlds, between times, between Fears. “The same somewhere, the same somewhen. You used him too; he caused this moment as much as I did. Send him with me. ”
“Very well. ”
The Spider reached down to pluck Martin out of the apocalypse and wind him within its threads as well. And then it seemed to hesitate. Something else crept into Annabelle’s voice, something gleeful and conspiratorial.
“He always did have great potential to serve the Web, ” it mused.
Jon went cold with dread. Of course nothing could ever be simple and easy - he should have known better.
"No, no, no, no, ” he tried to object, thrashing within its hold like prey, struggling to get toward Martin - but there was not truly any space there, and he could no more reach his boyfriend than he could have escaped. The Spider spoke over him.
“The same time, the same place, but not together ,” it decided, apparently satisfied. “We have our own plans for him .”
After that, there could be no more arguing.
The apocalypse imploded in upon itself as the collective fear of billions of people rushed all at once through a narrow crack in the fabric of reality, folding the tear shut behind it as it went.
But Jon and Martin were not dragged out alongside the Entities.
Instead they were thrown backwards by the force of the change that they had enacted upon the world.
For the briefest of moments, Jon could feel Martin physically: one arm was around him, hugging him tight against Martin’s front, and the other clutched tight to the knife still jutting out of his chest, severing his connection to this world and to the Eye. Martin’s fingers were going tacky with drying blood. Jon’s face was buried in Martin’s jumper, eyes screwed shut against pain like a child; Martin was crying into his shoulder, barely muffling the sound of his sobs.
And then strands of spider-silk dragged them violently apart, out of each other’s arms, and everything went black.
*
Jon woke up with a ragged, painful gasp, back arching up off the cold stone where he lay, fingers scrabbling for purchase. He couldn’t see - he was coughing up blood, his lungs punctured, his body convulsing.
The Ceaseless Watcher’s presence was unbearably heavy in his head.
He was alone.
The thought of being separated was a worse agony than the fatal wound; he opened his mouth to shout for Martin, and managed only a strangled scream, which echoed strangely in the dead air around him. As he did, though, the torn muscles of his throat and chest healed and tore and healed again, and even through the relief that he would not die like this - in the dark, alone, confused, afraid - he felt dread sink into his bones. Wherever, whenever , he was, he was still an avatar. The Eye would not let him die here - but to live, to do what he had come to do, he would have to feed it.
He tried his best to lie still, to calm his mind.
Where am I, he thought, calling on Beholding with all his might, and letting the knowledge suffuse him.
Exactly where you were , came the answer, placed in his mind as though it had always been there.
No wonder it was dark: he was in the Panopticon, still buried amongst the ruins of Millbank Prison, far below the Institute.
Of course, Jon didn’t need light to see by anymore. He simply opened his eyes and Looked around, pushing himself to sit up on shaking arms and ignoring the wrenching, burning pain of his wounds trying to close around the steel still sunk deep in his flesh. Martin had struck true. The knife had been very cold when it first stabbed into him, Jon remembered; by now it had warmed to the temperature of his body.
Perhaps he had been wrong, a moment before, to think he was alone. There was no one else alive inside the observation chamber alongside him, and Martin was beyond his sight - but he wasn’t quite alone .
On the throne where one day he would gaze out over a ruined world, sat the mummified, eyeless corpse of Jonah Magnus.
Once, the suit that Jonah died in was very fine indeed. Now it was threadbare, its beautiful embroidery and elegant tailoring worn away by the centuries into frayed tatters. The mouth that had so often worn the smirk that Jon knew pulling at the edge of Elias Bouchard’s lips hung open as though the body was screaming, exclaiming in horror or ecstasy while it embraced its patron. Its cheeks were sunken in, the hollows of its eyesockets the same, and its bony fingers seem to cling desperately to the arms of its throne, knuckles jutting out beneath translucent skin.
It was this creature, this artefact, its position within the Panopticon, that allowed Magnus to see anything he cared to focus on. Jon wondered with a sneer if, in his arrogance, Magnus might chance to look down here and realise what was about to happen, or if it would catch him entirely by surprise. He supposed it didn’t really matter. Even if Jonah did somehow Know that Jon was here to kill him, he would never make it through the tunnels in time to stop it.
Jon forced himself onto his shuddering knees, then, excruciatingly, up to his feet, dragging himself upright with a grip on the back of the throne. His breath came in wet, rattling huffs.
His fingers took a long moment to remember their strength, to figure out how to flex and how to curl inward properly. It took a great effort to pull the knife out of his body, and it drew a keening cry from between his gritted teeth with it.
With weak hands, Jon reached around, grasped the awful, undead thing by the chin, and cut its throat.
Its thin, papery skin split easily beneath the blade. It made no death rattle, no scream, no last, desperate pleas, as Jonah had in the apocalypse. Nothing happened at all, except that a Victorian mummy had a new gash opened across its long-dead throat with such furious force that it was almost beheaded.
But Jon Knew, without having to struggle to reach for the power, that he had killed it. The Ceaseless Watcher’s gaze was fixed entirely upon him.
Now just to dispose of what remained.
He staggered out through the Panopticon and up through the darkened tunnels, navigating on just the whispers of the Eye, one hand pressed desperately to the gaping hole in his chest, the other white-knuckled on the knife. His breaths still were not coming clear of gore, and blood - more blood than a human could lose and survive; how fortunate that Jon was no longer human - poured out from his stab wound and soaked through his shirt. Behind him, he left a trail of gruesome footprints, vivid red stains along the walls where they became narrow and he stumbled against them.
No need to climb out of the trapdoor in the Archives; Jon Knew, now, that there was a more direct route to the Head of the Institute’s office. Of course there was.
Over heavy case files in Research or in the back shelves of the Library, a handful of employees turned to frown at the walls, wondering if there was somehow some animal trapped within them - but the laboured scratching and limping footsteps that sounded from beyond plaster and wallpaper faded fast, and so for the most part they shook their heads and shrugged it off.
Mr. James Wright’s secretary had heard a rather strange noise a few minutes beforehand: a bitten-back howl of pain, a heavy thud , from inside the boss’s office. She had paused momentarily, manicured fingers hovering over her typewriter, ears cocked to listen. Perhaps she should knock on the door and check that he was alright…? But she knew that Mr. Wright believed she ought to be seen and not heard, ought to mind her own business - whenever he thought she was being nosy, he got this awful, knowing look on his face, and she couldn’t stand the thought of wandering in there to discover that he was perfectly fine, and annoyed with her for spying in on him. She delicately adjusted the lapels of her blouse and turned back to her typing, pointedly ignoring any other sounds Mr. Wright might make. Probably he had only stubbed his toe.
A secret entrance behind a false bookcase; Jon rolled his eyes at the trite nature of it, even as his still-clumsy hands struggled with the mechanism of its lock. He was fairly certain that he had died and woken up again - or at the very least blacked out - several times on the journey up from the tunnels, reopening his injuries over and over while he ran. But he didn’t care. This was too important.
Finally, he threw his entire meagre weight against the door and it slammed open, never reinforced against such an attack. Who would ever know that it was there, to attempt to break through from the inside?
James Wright lurched upright from where he had been hunched over his desk, clawing at his own face. He was a tall man, stone-faced and severe, and perhaps, at that moment, his attacker actively dying, he could have stood a chance at driving Jon away just long enough to escape. But he didn’t try to fight. He tripped blindly toward Jon, trying to get past him to the door.
Jon shouldered into him, and he fell hard, crashing to the floor. Wright only struggled for a moment as Jon knelt over him and shoved him back down - and then he froze, and Jon felt him try uselessly to call on the patron that had now abandoned him.
Out from within Wright’s ashen face stared two grey eyes, glowing with the unnatural power that had sustained them for so long. They were turning black, falling apart in their sockets: rotting, Jon realised, lips curling back in disgust, as Wright’s body rejected the dead tissue. That was all the man who would destroy the world was, now, in this new timeline. A dying parasite to be expelled.
“I don’t understand,” Jonah Magnus said, through stolen vocal cords, voice weak. “I don’t know-”
“You don’t know anything,” hissed Jon viciously, and plunged the knife that Martin had used to kill him into Wright’s chest, over and over, until he stopped twitching.
The universe stood still, for just a moment.
Jonah Magnus - every last part of him - was dead, and the future that had come screeching to a terrible end in 2018 was gone forever. I can rest, Jon thought, briefly hopeful. He allowed his shoulders to sag down in relief.
Then he jolted back in horror, as the full power of the Eye rushed out from Magnus and into him, choking him, filling his mind with knowledge unasked for, unwillingly revealed.
This new reality had a place for him too.
With that last thought, Jon collapsed.