Work Text:
This wasn’t Jon’s dream.
He was used to that by now, of course. He could barely remember the last time he’d had a dream that was really his own, had become, entirely against his will, a sort of connoisseur of other peoples’ dreams. It turned out they each had their own kind of texture, or signature, the way you could tell a paragraph of Bronte from one of Austen, or a scene from Hitchcock vs one from Welles, the dreamer leaving their own impression on the dream.
Well, “dreams”. Call them what they were: they were nightmares. The psychic scar tissue of other peoples’ worst moments. Apparently that was what he needed now, what fed the wolf inside him; his daily fix of second-hand trauma.
This one, though, was different. It was a proper dream. A pleasant one, actually. Being here felt wrong, not just unfamiliar but indecent. Like a kind of violation. But well, here he was.
And, there he was. John was in this dream.
In Martin’s dream.
He should really stop watching. Make himself wake up. Avert his eyes, somehow.
They were in a kind of library, but not the dusty, dizzyingly vertical library at the Institute. This was a room in a house, cozily lined with as many bookshelves as could possibly fit. There was a big window with velvet curtains pulled back to reveal a light spring rain falling outside, and there was a fireplace, unlit. Charles Mingus was playing softly somewhere, the sound gently crackling and humming under the melody in a way that suggested a vintage record. And there were Martin and Jon, sharing a small, overstuffed sofa with a fleece blanket draped over both sets of legs. The Archivist couldn’t help but look closer. Martin was drinking milky tea out of a Delft porcelain cup, and reading a volume of poems by Louise Gluck. Jon was cradling a thermos of black coffee in his left hand, and reading a battered copy of Brideshead Revisited. He couldn’t remember the last time he read a novel in waking life, certainly long before he started this job. For the past year he hadn’t read anything that wasn’t Archive-related, as far-reaching a category as that could sometimes be. The cane that he still occasionally used when his leg was acting up leaned against the side of the sofa.
At odd intervals, one of them would look up from their book. Martin read stanzas out loud as they struck him, shyly at first, murmuring “well, I don’t have your reading voice,” but gaining confidence as he went, his soft voice finding the sharp edges of the lines. His eyes met Jon’s in the pauses between words, and from his vantage point somewhere nearby and slightly above, the Archivist thought he could feel the gentle impact of the gaze. God, how long had it been since someone had actually looked him in the eye? What were they afraid would happen if they did?
Martin cleared his throat with a little hmm and read:
“What are we without this?
Whirling in the dark universe,
alone, afraid, unable to influence fate—
What do we have really?
Sad tricks with ladders and shoes,
tricks with salt, impurely motivated recurring
attempts to build character.
What do we have to appease the great forces?”
With each line his voice became fainter, his eyebrows furrowed closer together. Eventually he trailed off, looking utterly mystified, like he’d walked into a room and forgotten what he needed there.
“I’m sorry, I… I thought I was on a different page. That wasn’t what I meant to – ah – here we are.” He flipped through the pages quickly, fingers a little frantic, until he found another poem, cleared his throat again and started reading about lovers swimming in a lake at the height of summer. The record player, wherever it was, skipped, and the harsh bleat of a saxophone sounded three times in succession before resolving itself into a slow solo lament. Jon put down Brideshead Revisited for a moment to rest his hand on Martin’s upper arm, applying no pressure. Outside the window, it was still just slightly raining.
***
Jon woke up the next morning feeling like he had barely slept at all. Hardly a change of pace for him, of course. He filled his thermos with extra-strong coffee and smoked his first cigarette of the day before leaving for work, in case it made any difference at all. It didn’t, really. He might as well have been sleepwalking. Martin, on the other hand, seemed to be in a relatively cheerful mood. He kept busy as usual, but at some point after his lunch break, a box of iced biscuits from a posh bakery in the neighborhood seemed to have appeared beside the tea kettle in the break room. ‘Not a trap – go ahead!’ was written on the lid of the box, in the navy blue pen that only Martin used. It spoke to the general morale in the office that the note was probably necessary. The biscuits were quite good.
***
For the next week or so, Jon spent his nights in the usual places: cobwebbed tunnels, gore-caked battlefields, unfathomably dark caves. He thought maybe the dream of the library had been a one-time fluke, some kind of crossed signal or something. He didn’t really like to think about it, which he supposed was odd, since it was objectively less upsetting than any number of things he had gotten fairly comfortable thinking about lately. And the abstract, emotional concerns presented by the dream – the fear of, what, hurting someone’s feelings? – paled in comparison to the very real knowledge that he was one bad move or desperate choice away from getting Martin and the rest of them killed, or worse. Oh, he was very aware of the possibility of worse. Compared to what had happened to some of Gertrude’s assistants, Tim had gotten off easy. He didn’t want to think about that, either.
On a cold, cloudy Thursday night, though, the Archivist walked through a door in a burning house, just as the rafters started to collapse from the ceiling in a spray of red-hot embers, and when he stepped through on the other side it was a sunny afternoon in the rolling hills of what looked like Yorkshire, and there were Jon and Martin, walking along a wheat-gold path that emerged from a rather sparse wood to loop around the perimeter of a smallish lake. There was the slightest chill in the air, and they were dressed for warmth, Martin in a scuffed brown leather bomber jacket and Jon in his charcoal-grey trench coat and a soft-looking knitted scarf that he didn’t recognize. In Martin’s spare hand, the one that wasn’t lightly resting on Jon’s arm, he carried a large wicker picnic basket. Jon was using his cane, but he wasn’t putting much weight on it, and as they walked he was talking in a long, discursive sort of monologue.
As the Archivist listened more closely, he realized that he was going on at length about the history and mythology of the Library of Alexandria. There was some satisfaction in the realism of that detail. But as they made the loop around the lake, something in Jon’s tone changed. It took a moment to notice the shift, but it was clear enough: he’d gone from speaking about something he’d read a few too many books about over the years, to recounting events as though he himself had lived through them. He was casual about it, recalling people he’d worked with and the silly things they’d done millennia ago.
At first, Martin’s reaction didn’t change. He was still watching Jon with a fond expression, laughing quietly at a remark about the time when Apollodorus had spilled beer on a priceless scroll and nearly set the study of early Hellenic verse back a hundred years, nodding at details that John couldn’t possibly have known – that no surviving scholar knew – about the everyday work of caring for the papyrus. But as they walked, absorbed in their conversation, the Archivist noticed subtle changes in the background. The lake, which had been clear blueish-green at first, seemed to be growing darker, although the sky was still bright and cloudless. Despite the lack of wind, there was a visible current rippling the surface of the water. It was as if the shallow lake was growing deeper by the second. The Jon in the dream just kept walking and talking, but Martin was starting to notice the changes around him, his eyes darting back and forth between Jon’s face and the dark water.
“Maybe we should start to head back,” Martin said eventually, his tone slightly higher than normal. “The weather looks like it might be turning a bit nasty.”
“Don’t be such a worrywart, dear,” Jon replied lightly. It didn’t sound like him, and not only because he really wasn’t in the habit of calling people dear. “There isn’t a cloud in the sky. And it would be a shame to miss our picnic.”
The collar of his jacket didn’t quite hide the way Martin’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, before giving a little nod. Jon smiled and took his hand, squeezing it in his own as they walked. Below the almost black surface of the lake, a shadow moved.
The Archivist watched, and they kept walking. There was no perceptible change in their path, it looked like they were following the same loose oval around the lake, but then there was a faint splash as Jon’s feet started to wade into the edge of the lake. He did not slow down or let go of Martin’s hand. He didn’t even stop talking.
“Er… Jon?” Martin interrupted in a familiar, timid tone. “Mind where you’re going, now.” He laughed in a forced sort of way.
Jon kept walking into the lake, submerging more of his feet and legs with each step. The drop-off wasn’t steep enough for the water to be as deep as it looked. Martin was balking, now, planting his feet and pulling back. The Archivist could see the white in John’s knuckles as he held Martin’s hand tighter and tighter, pulling him with inhuman strength. “Jon,” he kept saying, “Jon,” sometimes pleading, sometimes demanding. “Really, John, this is a bit too much,” he said with a firm authority in his voice that was impressive under the circumstances, but Jon wasn’t listening.
The first wet, sucking sound of the muddy bank under Martin’s boot was sickening to hear. The shadow under the surface of the water thrashed like a whip, and this time it was clear that Martin saw it, too. But if Jon saw it, he didn’t care. He was hip-deep now, the dark water soaking into the fabric of his coat, staining it black. His legs were completely invisible. The Archivist couldn’t look away from their joined hands, from the painful-looking red skin around where Jon was gripping Martin and Martin was fighting with everything he had to get free, picnic basket tossed aside as he used both hands to try to pry Jon’s hand off, but it was no use. Martin, too, was disappearing beneath the disturbed surface of the lake.