Work Text:
Jon is drawn to that statement. He has his daily pile to comb through, and like every day, he sits, letting his mind go numb, staring at the pile until one of them calls to him. Usually it takes a few moments. Today is immediate. That one, in the middle. He’s scared to read it, of course. He pushes past it like always. Investigating is the only tool he has to address that fear.
He skims the intake details. Donna Gwynne, regarding an archaeological dig in Egypt, given in May of 2015. The story starts annoyingly, with a statement giver whose mealy-mouthed excuses do nothing to shield her from Jon's judgment. If one was to choose such a blatantly obnoxious life path, one should at least look it in the face. None of this the patriarchy made me rob graves because I don’t want to teach nonsense.
The thin veneer of safety that his self-righteousness gives him flakes away as he reads.
“Among the debris, I could see the pale wrapping of the corpse, tight around in a way that reminded me disconcertingly of a straitjacket.”
Nausea gnaws at his gut.
“It was moving. It was alive.”
“Of course it can’t scream. It doesn’t have any lungs.”
Jon imagines the tightness of the thing’s skin. Without muscles, tendons, or skin elasticity, its bones must have ground against each other with every agonizingly difficult movement. Like stone on stone.
“I cannot imagine what they would have thought of a person who could not die. I can imagine what they would have done to them.”
Jon’s hands are shaking when he wraps the statement up. He doesn’t let it hit his voice. He won’t let the fear consume him. There was the dice, after all, sitting there like a lifeline for his sanity. All he had to do to avoid a fate like that was not play any games with death.
The dice do very little to quell the fear. He’s connected a single pair of dots in a pointillism painting much, much larger and more complicated than he can possibly imagine. His mind provides another dot, to make it a triad – the watcher in the Alexandrian Archive. A creature, bony and gaunt, shambling around a lightless tomb forever. A living skeleton devoid of flesh except for a huge, impossible eye. Wandering its Archive forever. How much of that Archivist’s psyche had remained? Had they wandered into this willingly? Did they choose to become that? Had they tried to escape?
He... had to keep going. He didn’t have time to get hung up on this. He was two hours into his workday. There were multiple boxes of statements to pick through, discard, and organize. Then, there were follow-ups from Martin, Tim, and Sasha that needed his attention and synthesis. And then, he had to work on collecting those into recorded statements. And he had to do all that politely, because everyone was worried about him.
An intervention. Ugh. Did they not see what they were living in?! They did, obviously. They were living in it, too. He puts the statement away, organized. He wonders, not for the first time, if organizing the files is the correct move. Gertrude had clearly thought better of it, and she’d been much better informed than him. And she still ended up dead, murdered, probably by one of the four people he was working with. Probably not Martin, at least – he felt that, deep in his gut, to be true. But what good was his gut? Where had his gut been when he took this job in the first place? Notably silent! Nothing but excitement at getting paid well to work with the supernatural, in a job he was only barely qualified to do. Warmth at the fact that Elias was taking such a risk for him, to nurture his potential. And here-
There’s a knock at the door. Jon tries to push the paranoia away.
“Come in.”
Tim walks in, and Jon does his level best to greet him cordially.
“Sorry, am I interrupting?” Tim asks, scowling. Jon notes the anger impassively – it could be a clue to the puzzle he needs to solve if he doesn’t want to end up like that thing.
“No. Do you need something from me?” He tries to project authority. He is Tim’s boss. Although, maybe he should needle him – no, don’t be stupid. He was never good at subtle interrogation. He’d give everything away the second he tried.
Tim holds his gaze for a minute. What is he so angry about? What is he hiding?
“You know what? Think I’ll figure it out on my own, thanks,” Tim says curtly, and leaves.
Jon is frozen to his seat, taking in what just happened. What was that? Was he scoping out Jon’s patterns? Was he checking if he was alone? Keeping tabs on Jon’s research? What did Tim know that Jon didn’t-
He had to stop this line of inquiry, at least at work. All of them could see him here. They could knock on the door (or just barge in, like Sasha had a habit of doing). They’d see him just staring, scowling, at nothing. And he’d have to stop, and come up with an excuse, which he was never good at to begin with. His best disguise was getting lost in his assignments.
He feels watched. He’s used to that. Everyone always commented that they felt watched at the Institute. Jon certainly had, since the day he started the job. He’d chalked it up to frequencies at first. Now he tries not to think about it.
He passes Elias on the way to the bathroom. Elias gives him a patronizing look. He usually does. Jon’s been behaving erratically, so it’s fair.
Elias stops him, though.
“Jon, is something bothering you?”
“No. Just feeling unwell.”
Elias smirks. “Come on, Jon. Out with it. I want to know what’s on your mind.”
“The Donna Gwynne case has been bothering me,” he says, without meaning to. Where had that come from? He must have really wanted to share it.
“Refresh my memory, is that the trash bags full of teeth?”
“No. That’s from Kieran Woodward.”
“Right. So, this statement…?”
“It’s… nothing. Probably made up.” Elias gives him that look, and Jon finds himself wanting to open up. Elias has seen plenty, working here. He could probably give some guidance for dealing with the more frightening aspects of the job. “An Egyptian mummy, which may have been alive at the time of its discovery.”
“Oh, right,” Elias says, smiling brilliantly. “Yes. I remember the one. Ghastly stuff. Like those comic books.”
“Like… SC Comics?” Jon asks.
“Yes. Right? The children’s books. Corpses reading stories, swamp monsters, vampires, the lot.” Those stories were from the 1940s. A bizarre reference for Elias to make, but Jon doesn’t think too much of it. “I’m quite sure that statement was a prank, if it helps,” Elias continues.
Jon is immediately relieved. “What makes you say that?”
“Ms. Gwynne is a failed academic. You know how academics are when it comes to our research.” He shakes his head. “A failure like her would have even more to prove.”
“That… makes some sense,” Jon says.
Elias claps him on the shoulder. “Really, try not to worry so much, Jon. You’re doing very well.”
The words are nice, but Jon hates when people casually touch him. Especially people in authority. His hand is gross there and makes him feel small and scared.
“Ah, please, don’t,” he says, pushing Elias’ hand off.
Elias’ eyebrows shoot up. “I’m incredibly sorry, Jon. I didn’t realize.” He sounds right on the edge of sarcastic. Jon tells himself he’s reading too much into it.
“It’s fine,” Jon says tightly. “Thank you for the… advice. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Of course, Jon,” Elias says.
Jon walks briskly to the bathroom. He feels Elias watch him down the hall.
<>
Sasha stops by with some questions about the Hilltop Road case. Questions that Jon swears he answered for her, weeks ago. How could she have forgotten? There was something wrong with Sasha, he knew it, he just couldn’t put his finger on what. He needed to see where she went at night, in her off hours. Not just at lunch. Maybe he could dig into this Tom character, too – no, maybe not, maybe that would be pushing it. He’d have to use the utmost discretion, which he knows he’s piss-poor at. Any involvement with Tom, if that was his real name, would probably push the intervention into a restraining order.
He sees Elias cross past his office several times without coming in. That was unusual. Elias usually had no reason to be in this part of the building.
Martin pops into Jon’s office at lunch with tea, biscuits, and a meal replacement bar.
“What’s this?”
“Oh, I found some extras at my flat. I thought you might like them,” he says. This is a blatant lie, but Jon’s pretty sure it’s a kind lie, at least. Because he bought Jon meal bars, but doesn’t want to make it a thing. He just wants Jon to eat. There’s a jumbled bundle of feelings in Jon’s chest about this that he’s completely unwilling to untangle.
“Thank you, Martin.”
“Please at least try to eat it, okay?”
“Okay.”
Martin leaves. Jon could throw it all away. It might be poisoned-
It’s not poisoned. Of all of them, he suspects Martin the least. He knows that’s probably stupid. Trust could so easily get him killed. But Martin has been through so much here, because of him. It would be too elaborate to fake. Wouldn’t it?
Anyways, Jon appreciates the attention, as patronizing as it ought to be. It’s... nice. To have someone make you tea. Really… nice. The biscuits and the meal bar shouldn’t be this good to eat, but Jon had forgotten to pack a lunch, and didn’t want to leave his office for too long in the middle of the day, when anyone might use the master key and unlock it.
He should probably quietly change the lock-no, he shouldn’t, because everyone would notice, immediately-
He eats another of the biscuits as he skims another statement. Out of the corner of his eye, something moves. Jon jolts and turns to face it.
In the shadows, for just a moment, he sees it. That thousand-year-old corpse, severed from rot and putrefaction by oils and balms. It’s so small, Jon thinks. Humans are so much muscle and fat. When you take it all away, there’s barely anything left. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t make any noise. Jon knows it’s watching him, and it’s suffering.
He blinks, and it’s gone. He drops the biscuit he’d been eating. He walks over to where the thing had been. He turns on his phone torch and the beam of light shakes in his hands. There’s nothing but shadows and a few papers on the floor. He picks the papers up, but there’s nothing significant about them.
It would hurt, of course, being mummified alive. The pain must have been indescribable. Just thinking about the procedures being done to a corpse had made him shudder. But Jon knows that hadn’t been the worst part. It had been the boredom, the isolation.
Jon doesn’t know if he can just move on, knowing that this is a thing that could happen in this world. That it has, most likely, already happened, at least once. To at least one person. It had been a person, once. What was it like inside of its head? To feel your perceptions go numb over hundreds of years, leaving you in an insensible sea of agony and exhaustion?
Maybe it was making a connection with him. Maybe all that suffering had transformed it into some kind of ethereal being. Maybe it needed to be seen and understood to move on. That would be almost nice. Jon chuckles joylessly. That’s not what’s happening, and he knows it. Either he’s losing his mind, or… He doesn’t want to contemplate the alternatives.
He passes Elias again, on his way out of the building. It’s the fifth time he’s seen Elias today, as opposed to the usual three times a week. He doesn’t like that one bit.
<>
The feeling of being watched follows him home. On the bus, and up his stairs, and into his flat. But he doesn’t see the mummy again. He probably hadn’t seen it at work, either. He was just spooked by what was a very unsettling statement. A statement that frankly might be made up altogether by an embittered failed criminal.
Jon doesn’t usually unwind, exactly, when he gets home. He has boxes of work that he’s taken home with him, and notebooks with information too sensitive to risk bringing to the Archives. But home usually feels safe-ish. Safer than the Archives.
Not so, today. In his living room, he feels eyes everywhere.
“What?” he asks, out loud, to his empty living room. “What do you want?”
Nothing happens. No invisible ghost or monster materializes and tells Jon what it’s doing, or how Jon could politely ask it to leave him alone, thank you.
It could only be the mummy watching him. Right? Wait, no. He needs to keep his mind open. He doesn’t have enough of this puzzle to even guess at the bigger picture. But… he doesn’t know what else it could possibly be.
It doesn’t matter. He has too much to do. If allows himself to be paralyzed by the fear, he’s doomed.
He tries and fails to pore through the statements he’d brought home. He can’t do anything but reread that statement, over and over. The watching gaze intensifies as he skims, trying to make sense of it, trying to locate some new piece of information to focus on that might unravel anything new.
Had it truly died when Ms. Gwynne had stabbed it? Was it possible to kill something like that? It seemed from the statement that it had, eventually, found peace. How? Its heart couldn’t possibly have served any physiological function at that point. Was the heart linked to… all this? Did these forces, or patterns, or whatever they were, care about the human symbology of hearts? Gertrude, too, had been shot in the chest. Was that the only way to kill someone like… someone who’d gotten too close to all this? He feels the knife ripping into his leathery flesh, over and over, scraping against his ribs, and then peace. Relief at being stabbed to death. Would that happen to him, too? Had Gertrude been relieved to die?
He has to lay down. He’s going to be sick.
How many years had it sat there? What had it done to warrant such a profoundly cruel punishment? Who was it before? When did it stop being a person and become little more than a living testament to human cruelty?
He looks at the clock and sees that it’s nearly 9 at night. God, he’s wasted a lot of time fixating on this mummy. He hasn’t eaten since the lunch Martin gave him. He smirks a little, thinking how cross Martin would be with him if he knew. He probably did know, actually. It was probably why he was always pelting Jon with biscuits, sandwiches, meal bars, and tea that was more milk than water. Jon gets up to make himself some food. He feels a pair of eyes on him the entire time, but he manages to choke down a TV dinner. It almost helps.
He needs to sleep. He’s slept badly for the last several days, and it might be contributing today’s… sensations. Hypnagogic hallucinations from sleep deprivation were known to be particularly unpleasant. He doesn’t need to roll around fruitlessly for hours to know that he’s not getting any rest without some significant help from medication. Not tonight. He opens his over-the-counter sleep aid and takes the amount he knows will knock him out. Then he slides into bed and closes his eyes. He pulls the covers up, which never does anything to hide him from the eyes he feels everywhere. He waits until the sleep medicine makes him numb enough to finally drift off.
<>
Jon doesn’t groggily wake up to the morning light and the sound of his alarm. Instead, his consciousness filters in slowly, and he finds he cannot move. He tries to call out. His jaw shifts with a crack that he feels in the void where his eardrums should be. He tries to think where he is, how he got here.
He’d gone to work, at the Archives, just this morning. He’d read the statement about the mummy.
He tries to move but nothing happens. There’s no muscles and tendons attached to his bones. His skin is so dry it burns, his entire body burns, inside and out.
He catches glimpses of memories he couldn’t have possibly experienced. He’d been alive for a very, very long time. Numbly gathering souls. Wandering from plains to deserts, hot sun beating down on him.
More vividly, he remembers the look in Tim’s eyes when he walked into Jon’s office this morning. He remembers going for drinks with Tim, years ago. Friends of friends. They weren’t close, but it was always fun when they happened to be at the same gatherings. Their lives hadn’t been a fraction as terrifying, then.
He felt them pull out his organs. He was paralyzed, he couldn’t move. Terror, realizing what they were doing. He knew he couldn’t die. He’d tried to kill himself for centuries.
Maybe Martin would find him here. Maybe Martin could help, somehow. He tries to think about him as hard as he can, willing him to find this crypt, somehow. How pathetic.
He felt his body liquefy as they pickled him in salt. The linen scratched at the hollows of his nerves when they stuffed him to keep his shape. He felt the threads slowly decay inside of him as time stretched on.
The boredom and isolation...
No one was coming.
How could he still be alive? How could he still be himself? They’d removed part of his brain, not to mention all of the organs. Everything but his skin and bones was gone. How could there be any soul animating him? Was this what death was like for everyone, or just him? He didn’t know which was worse. He wouldn’t wish this on anyone, but he wants so badly to not be alone.
He’d spent… some amount of time, trying to escape. He’d been able to move, at first. Bound, but able to jump and writhe around. The maze was impossible. His ability to move deteriorated with his muscles, until he was here. Stuck.
He can still manage a little twitch, sometimes, when he puts his entire soul into it.
He misses people. He misses being a person.
Who did this to him? Why?
How many other people had suffered this?
What had he done to deserve this?
He yearns for his flat. The longer he’s here, the harder it gets to imagine that set of memories as anything but an illusion he conjured during the centuries of complete deprivation. How long would it take before he lost his sense of self completely? Until this reality made London feel like a blip, a dream? Until he forgot it entirely?
What was personhood? Could anyone really be a self?
Every millimeter of his skin is unbearably itchy.
A rat has found its way into the tomb. Jon hears it skitter across the floor. It’s the first sound he’s heard in… he has no idea how long. It fills him with fresh emotion. He wishes he could see it. He would love to watch it die.
And then it’s more silence, for… an amount of time.
Darkness, a complete void.
He hears something, which very well may be his mind playing tricks on him. He begs it’s not. Please. Someone. Free me from this. He doesn’t care how. He just needs the suffering to end.
The sound gets closer. Footsteps. Jon hopes. It’s stupid to hope but he does. Maybe they’ll find him. Maybe he’ll be able to eat them, and that’ll give him the strength to finally escape.
He hears a heavy rock pushed aside a few hundred yards off.
“Now, what’s in here?” a voice says. A man’s voice. It’s unlike any voice Jon has ever heard, and it’s like all of them.
Jon struggles to move but can’t. He has to get the man’s attention. He has to lure him over. He can’t. His limbs refuse to move. There’s nothing left to animate them.
The man pulls the lid away from Jon’s coffin, and Jon can see. He has no idea how – his eyes were removed with the rest of his organs. But he can see. The man’s face is a blur. His features don’t exist. Jon can’t understand how tall he is, what race he is, what kind of clothes he’s wearing. He’s just a man, and he’s here.
Something is wrong. Jon is very afraid. He should be able to see this man. Why can’t he?
“There you are.” Jon swears he knows that voice, but can’t remember how. He doesn’t know from which life.
The man starts touching Jon’s leathery flesh. Some of it crumples to dust under his fingertips. “I’ve always wanted to try this,” he says.
What does that mean? And then the man is unwrapping the bandages. The difference of sensation is incredible, even if Jon’s hands are still trapped where they’ve been dormant for hundreds of years. Maybe he needs him unwrapped to help him. He’s already helped him, honestly, by giving him something else to think about.
The man touches the newly revealed skin. Jon is having a harder time convincing himself that he’s doing this to help him. He keeps making comments about how fascinating he finds the situation. Maybe he doesn’t know Jon is alive. Jon just has to move, somehow, to let him know. Like the creature in the statement.
He uses every ounce of force and will he has to lift his arm. It creaks painfully.
The man just looks at him, unsurprised.
“What?” he asks, smirking. “You don’t like being touched like that?” And he goes back to stroking the skin covering his arms. The touch, which had been uncomfortable when Jon had some hope, feels like a complete violation now. The man knows.
Maybe being alone was better.
The touching matters more to one part of him than the other. He’s losing track of which half is which. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t want this. He wants help, or to hurt, because hurting might help.
He was stupid for hoping for anything good at this point. There is literally nothing left for him to do but suffer.
The man moans. “Oh, that’s very nice.”
Jon feels numb as the man continues to touch him with his dirty fingertips. The oils from his living flesh hurt, even with his feather-light pressure. His skin on his right collarbone crumbles under a particularly rough touch. The man doesn’t seem to care. He lifts one of the flakes of Jon’s skin to his lips, then unceremoniously eats it. He takes a moment, as if to parse the flavor, the texture, then makes a contented little hum.
“Mummification is a fascinating thing,” he says eventually. “I trust you know all about the chemical processes at play.”
Jon does. He’d studied them, when he’d been a morbid grad student. Late nights with his girlfriend. Was that really him? What a paradise that had been. One time, they’d made popcorn. He remembers the smell of it, and the oil streaks on his notes. One of his textbooks, even, when he’d carelessly flipped a page without wiping his fingers off first. He was worried, because it was a rental. Georgie laughed at him, who would notice a smudge on one page of a textbook that thick? He worried too much, eat more popcorn-
“Stay with me, darling,” the man says.
Jon’s stabbed with a new spike of fear. Can this man read his mind? Was there nothing he wouldn’t violate?
And Jon can’t do a goddamned thing.
The man shudders and takes several deep breaths. “Oh, thank you.”
Jon doesn’t know where the fountain of rage comes from, but it’s strong enough to animate his hand. He grabs the man’s wrist tightly, breaking skin. The man yells in pain.Yes! Jon could pin him down, consume him, steal his strength, escape-
The man snaps Jon’s hand off at the wrist and throws it to the other side of the room. It shatters into a mess of bones. Jon feels emptiness where his hand should be. The man hits him roughly upside the head. His neck twists at an unnatural angle, and gets stuck there. He cannot move. The numbness returns.
“Anything else you’d like to try?” he says, out of breath and smiling. He hits Jon again, several more times. Pieces of him fly off. The core of Jon’s body that remains in his control shrinks every time.
Jon doesn’t move. He can’t let himself care. He doesn’t want to lose any more body parts. He doesn’t know how much he can lose and still live. If his head breaks off from his body, he might never be allowed to die.
He lets the man touch every part of him. His hands wander lower, lower. He taps the bizarre, rock-hard, tiny nub between Jon’s legs. Oh, Jon thinks dully, of course he wants that, too. This is what people did to him when he couldn’t defend himself. When he was too drunk, or too weak. Or a living corpse, he adds to the list.
The man touches the remains of his dick. It burns. It’s so solid, like a pebble, where it should be pliant, firm, yielding. The nerves are long dead to sensation, but Jon also experiences what it might feel like if they weren’t, and that’s so much worse. The man gets to his knees no no no and licks. The moisture is horrible. His mouth is destroying what little is left of Jon’s body, exposing it to bacteria and decay.
“I’ve always been curious about this,” the man says, inanely, as he gets up. Then he picks Jon up. Jon can do nothing as this stranger lays his corpse on the ground, then spreads the remains of his legs. They crack but don’t break off altogether. Jon watches him pull his cock out and stroke it once, twice. Jon dully hopes that’s all he’ll do, but he knows better. The man gropes around for his entrance. It’s destroyed, barely there. The man finds it and rips the hole bigger. He can’t be – who would –
He pushes his dick in the torn, leathery hole between Jon’s legs. It rubs against the dry paper of his skin. Every thrust deteriorates him. But that other version of him feels it, too, the way he might, with his flesh-and-blood body. Swollen pink folds penetrated by something much too big. No lubrication. Dragging back and forth, ripping him up. He’s bleeding. The man’s pubes smack up against Jon’s dick with every thrust, giving the barest hint of pleasure. Emotionally, it’s worse than the tearing of his insides. His left hipbone cracks under the weight.
He experiences both, the sex and decay, over and over. He forces himself to focus on the sensations of this body, the one here. He’d fantasized, in his other life, sometimes, about being born without genitals; or maybe they’d just atrophy away altogether and stop bothering him. The skin between his legs is disintegrating rapidly, and the nerves that might transmit pleasure have long since shriveled into uselessness. He could laugh, now, if he had vocal cords to rub together.
He can’t imagine what the man is experiencing, or why. Why? Who would do this to a living corpse?
It’s not enough violation, somehow. The man, groaning in satisfaction, starts touching Jon’s face, too. Stroking up his cheek, into the hollow pits of his eyes. In a moment of stupid fury, Jon manages to snap his head and take one of the man’s fingers in his mouth. He bites, hard as he can. The man stops, swears, rears his hand back. Then he laughs.
Jon can’t bring himself to care what happens to him, anymore. He’s glad he at least got to make this man suffer a little bit.
The man comes, then. Inside of Jon. He feels the spunk in the hollowed-out cave where his organs used to be. It burns, chemical. He hurts everywhere. His body and mind are in searing agony, but at least it’s over. He can be alone again.
“Oh, you don’t think I’m done with you, do you?” the man asks. And he starts thrusting again.
Jon doesn’t know what he’s thrusting against, there’s nothing left of him there. But he feels it in the exact way he doesn’t want to. Flesh and dead sensation. Pain and pleasure.
Jon can’t breathe. He realizes he couldn’t breathe this entire time, and has only just become aware of that now. There’s a sound, distantly, in his ears. The man keeps thrusting, fogging Jon with pleasure and revulsion. The noise gets louder. It sounds like screaming.
“Oh, Jon, don’t go so soon,” the man says, acridly sweet. Jon’s blood runs cold. How does he know my name-
He wakes up screaming and drenched in sweat. He keeps screaming, disoriented and terrified, while his brain wakes up.
He… has a body, again. No, he has flesh. He can move. He can see. He’s alive, fully.
He’s in his apartment. It was a nightmare. That had to be a nightmare. Nothing but a nightmare. A particularly vivid, terrifying nightmare.
It’s five-thirty in the morning. Thirty minutes before his alarm is set to go off. He shuts it off for the day. There’s no way he’s getting back to sleep.
Something’s oozing between his legs. Jon feels cold and nauseous. He’s been on testosterone for over ten years now, he doesn’t get wet from dreams, from nightmares. He frantically turns the light on and forces himself to look between his legs. Ignoring the dysphoria, the way his body always makes him think of a vicious gash, makes him think of being impaled. Thick, frothy, pink-tinged fluid leaks from between his legs.
He manages to fling himself at the bedside trash can before he starts heaving. Nothing but bile comes up, over and over.
He’s hyperventilating. He needs to calm down and-
He can’t calm down. He’s being hunted. It’s over for him. Something found him before he figured any of it out, and it’s coming for him. He knew this was coming. He didn’t manage to get ahead of it. And it knows what he fears most.
He needs to calm down.
He forces himself to breathe.
He hobbles to the bathroom and runs the shower as hot as possible. He aches, inside. It stings.
He washes himself between his legs. He starts walking himself through his recovery procedure.
He doesn’t need to worry about pregnancy. Step one, taken care of.
He might want to get tested for STDs. Did he need to get a rape kit? No. God forbid he get the police involved with this.
He-
He’s being ridiculous. He’s triggered. He had a bad dream – a terrible dream. Of course he did – he’d been thinking about that mummy all day, even hallucinating it in his office. The nightmare probably went there because he… had experience, with that kind of fear. It was probably similar enough for his mind to connect the dots. Brains try to make sense of things based on what they already know.
In his delirious, half-asleep state, he’d thought that the little bit of a mess between his legs was more than just that. It had looked so vivid and pink, just like… But it wasn’t real. It had to have been a hypnopompic hallucination based on a memory. It’s washed away, now, which is fine. Jon doesn’t need to check it again. It’s fine.
Besides, a ghost probably couldn’t give him a disease.
Was it a ghost? It was a man-
It was a nightmare, he corrects himself.
He turns the heat down in the shower and tries to wash until he feels clean again. His insides hurt. He washes them, again, with soap. It burns. It burns his cuts-no, it burns because it’s soap, and soap shouldn’t go there. If there were any cuts, he probably gave them to himself with his fingers.
Horrible memories keep popping up. He mentally smacks them down. That’s over and done with. He’s not safe, but that’s not happening, not right now.
By the time he gets done with his shower, it’s seven-thirty. Fuck. He’s supposed to be at the Institute in a half hour. It’s a twenty-minute drive with no traffic, and he’s not dressed. He pulls out his phone and quickly composes and email to Elias.
I’m running late today. Got a late start. Sincerest apologies, will not happen again.
Elias’ response makes his heart sink.
That’s fine, Jon. Are you okay? Please stop at my office when you get in.
Great. So, he can’t take his time, because Elias is going to know he’s late, and is going to be paying attention to exactly when he arrives. Why had he texted him at all? Why didn’t he quit?
Because he can’t quit. He gets dressed.
The bedding is filthy. Jon… may have wet the bed, a little. Like a goddamned toddler. He’s never done that before. It’s humiliating. Another dull fear – is he losing control of his bodily functions? It’s the way we all go, if something else doesn’t take us out first, but he’d hoped to have a few more decades at his peak before that particular decline. He gathers up the bedding and throws it into the wash. It smells wrong. He tries not to think about it. He can’t live in a world where something like that can happen to him every night.
On the bus to work, he feels everyone’s eyes on him. The bus driver’s gaze lingers far too long. The passengers seem to be looking at him through the reflections of their phones and out of the corners of their eyes. Studying him. Keeping an eye on him, making sure he doesn’t do anything rash. Every time he tries to meet someone’s gaze, they look away.
Does he look as crazy as he feels right now? Is he drawing that much attention to himself? He wishes he could disappear, if only for today.
He’s probably being paranoid. No one is watching him.
<>
Rosie knocks on the door to Elias’ office. Jon is 45 minutes late.
“Come in,” Elias says, and she opens the door for Jon. He thanks her, and she stares at him a little too long before nodding and closing the door behind Jon.
Elias sits at his desk, and he looks at Jon pityingly. “Good lord, man. Did you get any sleep?”
Jon’s animal brain screams at him to run. He sits down, across from Elias. Elias, who very well may have killed Gertrude. Who’s definitely hiding something, if not many things. He cannot trust Elias.
“I’m fine,” he says tightly.
Elias shakes his head. “None of that, Jon. I’m concerned for your well being.”
How can Jon exit this conversation as quickly as possible? “I appreciate that,” he lies. “I’ve been thinking of seeing a doctor about the sleep issues.”
“Oh, I’m very glad to hear that. It does seem to be impacting your life a great deal.”
Jon grimaces and tries not to argue. He wants to leave.
“You do incredible work for us when you’re not unwell,” Elias says. Jon can’t help the bloom of pride in his chest. “It’s important to me that you stay in good shape. You’re indispensable.”
Jon swallows. He… might be too hard on Elias, generally. Elias has only ever treated him excellently. He wants Jon to succeed. He’d taken a risk hiring Jon for this position, he'd told him. He’d put his neck out because he saw a spark in Jon that he wanted to help cultivate. As much as Tim was his longtime acquaintance with a chip on his shoulder – and as much as Sasha was an incredibly capable, if quirky, subordinate – Elias was a mentor, taking Jon under his wing. “Well. Thank you. I’m sorry again for my tardiness.”
Elias tsks . “I’m sure you had your reasons. I’m willing to overlook the very first time you’ve been late.”
“Thank you.” Jon isn’t sure why Elias called him in here. “Do you, uh, need something from me?”
“Yes,” Elias says. He pulls a folder out of one of his drawers and hands it to Jon.
Jon’s blood runs cold, and the good will he’d been extending Elias vaporizes. There’s a bandage on Elias’ finger, exactly where Jon had bitten the man in his nightmare. Had that been there yesterday? He doesn’t think it had been.
“Jon?”
“What happened to your finger?” Jon asks, as carefully as he can.
Elias’ eyebrows raise, and his lips draw up in the slightest smirk. “My finger?”
Jon tries to keep his voice steady. “The bandage.” He tries not to think through the implications. If he does, he’ll lose his nerve.
“I cut myself chopping celery for a mirepoix.”
Jon simply doesn’t believe that. Not at all. The wound underneath that bandage would only be jagged and bruised. There would probably be a hand-shaped bruise on his wrist, too.
“Show me.”
“Excuse me?”
Jon realizes he sounds insane. “I need to see it. Please show it to me.”
“This is exceedingly strange, but if it’ll help you trust me…” Elias looks too happy as he peels away the bandage, revealing a single red gash on his finger. It’s smooth, even. Deeper in the center, and trails off to needle-like points at the ends. A simple knife wound. Jon stares at it, like it’s an illusion that’ll glimmer away if he catches just the right angle. But it doesn’t.
The ache between Jon’s legs rears its head. It’s like he’s ripped open the newly-healing tears, somehow. It throbs. He feels the man pushing into him, over and over. His crumbling skin, and the painful phantom sensations of his…
But it’s just a cut, on his boss’s finger. From chopping celery.
“...Okay,” Jon finally says. “Never mind. I thought… I don’t know.” He doesn’t know what else to say or do.
Elias just smiles, pityingly. “I hope someday you might tell me what this was about. I can see you’re in no state now.”
Jon burns with shame. He’s losing it, isn’t he? Off his fucking chair.
Elias unhurriedly pulls another bandage from his desk. And Jon swears that for a second, he sees the wound shift to a clear bite mark. Bruised, jagged, irregular, and deep. He wants to jump across the desk and grab Elias’ hand, show him what he sees, force him to explain anything.
He doesn’t because there are two ways things could go if he did. If Elias was guilty, he might just rape and murder Jon, right there. Maybe worse. Maybe so, so much worse. If he wasn’t guilty, Jon would have assaulted his boss because he had a little cut on his finger.
Elias wraps his finger back up. He looks inordinately pleased with himself. “Do go through that file, when you get a chance.”
Jon glances dully at the file, which is a list of artefacts to check through. Make sure they’re all in order and accounted for.
“Okay,” Jon says.
“Thank you, Jon. You’re dismissed.”
Jon gets up to leave.
“Please, take better care of yourself,” Elias says.
“I’ll… try.”