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"These are the ones," Jon says as he snaps the jewelry box shut on the pale green stones. It was obvious even before he opened the box, the certainty that this piece, out of all the clutter in the estate cellar, was the thing he was looking for. But of course he couldn't help the curiosity, the need to know, the need to see—
There's a giggle from behind him. "The Eyes of Revelation," Michael says, faintly singsong in that way it always has. "And such revelations they'll offer you, Archivist."
"Don't make me regret this more than I already do," Jon says without turning around.
Something sharp and deadly that is not a hand, but serves the function of a hand, strokes the nape of his neck. "Come into my parlor," Michael suggests.
Jon turns, hand out to push it away, but he meets only air. On the far side of the cellar, just visible between stacks of crates, he can make out one corner of a yellow door. The Eyes of Revelation, he thinks as he makes his way through the clutter. The Throat of Delusion. How many significant organs does the Twisting Deceit have?
He is simultaneously certain of the answers three, nine, and seventeen, and deliberately, forcibly puts the question out of his mind. The doorknob rattles under his hand, ill-maintained as everything else in this house, and creaks open into that uncomfortably familiar hallway. Jon crosses the threshold.
The door clicks shut behind him and vanishes, but Michael doesn't appear. "Come on," Jon says irritably. "I've already agreed to this. You don't have to spend any more time trying to confuse me into doing something stupid."
Michael laughs, and Jon sees movement in one of the mirrors in the endless hallway. "I just enjoy the anticipation so much," it says. "Something terrible is coming, but it isn't quite here yet."
Jon stops, leaning against a bare patch of wall, between one of the endless mirrors and a portrait of someone whose features are impossible to make out. He's starting to wonder if he's making a terrible mistake. Granted, making terrible mistakes has become something of a lifestyle lately, but trusting Michael might make the top of the list. Is the Eye truly so bad that the Spiral might be a step up?
A heavy weight pins him against the wall and he startles, eyes flying open. Michael's human disguise smiles at him from far too close. "Look at you, making that face. Ready to get started?" The jewelry box is plucked out of Jon's hand and Michael leans in to kiss him with what looks like a mouth and feels like something writhing and alien. He's escaping what the Beholding has planned for him, he reminds himself.
Claws clamp down on his arms, his legs, some of them coming from Michael and others from the wall itself. "What—what are you doing?"
"Helping," Michael says too earnestly, delighted with itself. Another claw snarls in Jon's hair, and Michael draws a bone-bladed finger down the side of his face in a parody of sweetness. "No matter how ready you think you are, people do tend to try to run instead of facing their fears."
It's right. As its hand hovers in front of his face, as he sees fingers but feels something very wrong brush his skin, Jon wants nothing more than to flee.
"Hmmm." Michael watches him too closely, drawing this out. "What would someone say if they wanted to be reassuring right now? Relax? Keep breathing?"
"Here's some anesthetic?" Jon suggests acidly.
Michael laughs in pure awful delight. "I'm so glad I don't actually want that," it confesses. Before Jon can find a retort, its fingers plunge into his eye socket. Jon screams.
His whole body goes numb, then tingling, dizziness making his head spin and his limbs falter. The pain is horrific, hot and sharp, bone claws scraping against flesh too tender to bear any touch at all. The panic is even worse, the terror of losing his eyes—what was he thinking to go along with this? how could he possibly? Fluid runs hot down his cheek as that side of his vision goes dark and despite himself, despite all of this, because of what he's become he is still watching with his remaining eye when Michael pulls the first one out and turns it so he can see it, lidless, bloodied, staring back.
"Oh, no," Jon says weakly. He's going to be sick. He tries to pull free. It doesn't work.
"Halfway there," Michael croons. "You're going to feel so much better."
He can't even close his eye when Michael reaches for it. The last thing he sees are the soft, human fingers that the monster touching him absolutely does not have. Then the world goes red-black, the color of the pain lancing through to the back of his skull. He's screaming again. It won't matter but he can't help it. Michael had better appreciate this.
There's an awful, pulling pressure, and then a snap, and his body sags as all the tension of vigilance leaves him. He's gasping for breath in the darkness, his face sticky-wet, but there's a horrible, queasy sense of relief to it.
"You did it," he says breathlessly.
"You see?" Michael says. It sounds so pleased it must have chosen that phrasing on purpose. "Much better, isn't it."
"I think—I don't know." Jon swallows hard. It still hurts so much, but he's had far too much experience tolerating pain in the last year or so. "Maybe it is."
Michael strokes his face with its terrible bone fingers. "Casting away everything you were meant to be," it says contentedly. "Trusting in the beneficence of the manifestation of deceit. Hold still."
It presses something cold and hard into Jon's empty eye socket, the chill at first wrenching and then oddly soothing on the raw flesh. He makes a terribly undignified sound. Michael coaxes his eyelids shut over the intrusion, the first of the two stones.
"Just lovely," it murmurs, softly, doing a good imitation of someone sincere. It kisses the ridge of his eyebrow and then licks, a too-long, curious tongue tracing the edge of Jon's eye socket. He shudders. He can feel its breath against his skin above the wound and that somehow seems almost more unsettling than the licking. "Here you go."
It places the second stone into the remaining socket; Jon does his best to make his eyelids close on his own. The gems feel uncomfortable, cold and heavy, pressing in on flesh that isn't strong enough to stand it. He agreed to this. He has to remember that.
Michael kisses his forehead. He imagines it leaving a bloody mark. "You can take it from here, can't you?"
"Right. Yes." The last step has to be his. He clears his throat. "Mine eyes have deceived me. My surroundings have been opaque to me. My world has refused my understanding. Give me therefore new sight; give me clarity and understanding. Give me revelation."
He feels the change happening even before he finishes the incantation: stone bonding to flesh, new nerve pathways digging into fluorite to anchor the Eyes of Revelation to his body and use these gems, impossibly, to replace the delicate and complex organs he just surrendered to a monster. The pain doesn't subside, exactly, but it becomes tolerable. Unimportant. Just a footnote to the pulse of strangeness and power behind his eyelids. He opens his eyes, and for the first time he sees Michael in its entirety, as it truly is.
What it's doing right now is its equivalent of smiling.