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Jon accepts Basira’s package from Martin with a smile, but a puzzled frown tugs at his eyebrows once he sees the contents. “There—there are tapes in here, as well. Did she say anything about tapes?”
Martin shrugs. “She didn’t mention it? But I didn’t check it until after the call.” His expression goes distant as he thinks it over, but then the corner of his mouth quirks up. “I assume it’s her attempt at a—a, a varied diet? Eating your greens, you know?”
Jon can’t help a quiet laugh. “Probably. I’m sure it’ll work fine.” His hand drifts to one of the paper statements, though, and he lets it. The statements always feel better, somehow, when he allows his subconscious to choose them, and right now he’d like to squeeze every drop of—nourishment?—out of them as possible.
“I wonder what the tapes are,” says Martin idly, zipping up his jacket. “More of Gertrude’s statements, maybe?”
“Seems like it,” says Jon absentmindedly, already scanning the front page of the statement. Statement of Hazel Rutter, concerning a house fire; seems like pretty standard Desolation fare, though perhaps it could be a different Entity. He won’t know until he starts reading.
Then Martin’s words fully register, and Jon’s brow furrows. He tears his eyes away from the ornate letterhead, though it’s a struggle—it seems it the statement already has its hooks in him. Then, every movement feeling like he’s swimming through mud, he deliberately drops it to the floor in a swirl of pages, pulls the package into his lap, and starts digging through it.
“Changed your mind?” asks Martin from the doorway. His hand is on the knob, but he’s not across the threshold yet.
“I thought…” Jon trails off as he shoves tapes out of the way. “It occurred to me. When I found Eric Delano’s statement—the one that helped me figure out how to, to quit, I wasn’t drawn to it. In fact, I was sort of… repelled by it, actually. Something made me want to ignore it, to pass it by.”
“So…?”
“It occurred to me,” Jon repeats grimly, “that if there are tapes of Gertrude’s that I haven’t heard yet, they might prove valuable. And then, when I decided to try listening to one, I realized that every single thing in this box felt like Eric Delano’s statement. I don’t want to listen to, or read, any of them. Except the statement I took out first. And that one, from the cover page at least, seemed pretty much bog-standard. It doesn’t make sense that it would be more interesting than even the most ordinary of Gertrude’s recordings, let alone the only good statement in the whole lot.”
His fingers all but flinch away from a tape two-thirds of the way down in the pile. That’ll do. Now he just has to get it out of the box—easier said than done, with his fingers stiff and uncooperative. But he manages.
“Oh,” says Martin softly, and comes over to sit beside Jon. “Do you want me to…?”
Jon reaches over and turns off the tape recorder, wincing at the loud click. It must be his imagination that makes the noise seem sullen and reproachful. “You certainly don’t have to stay,” says Jon, ejecting the tape inside and fumbling the new one into its place. “But if it does turn out to be important…”
Martin finishes the sentence for him. “Then I’ll probably have to listen at some point anyway.” He nods, and settles in as Jon presses the play button.
It is, indeed, one of Gertrude’s tapes. But it’s not a statement.
“Right,” comes the familiar voice. “If you’re listening to this, then it is likely that—” Gertrude abruptly stops speaking, and Jon wonders for a split second if she’d been interrupted by something, before she begins again. “No. Let’s not beat around the bush. If you’re listening to this, it means I’m dead. And you have been chosen to be my replacement as Head Archivist.”
Jon listens, in mounting shock, as Gertrude lays out the mess his life has become over the last few years in neat, concise detail. He’s too stunned to even be surprised when Leitner makes an appearance.
When the recording finally clicks off, he just sits there, digesting. He can feel Martin’s gaze on the side of his face, but he doesn’t even have the energy to turn his head. When he finally forces himself to open his mouth, to say something, anything, a bitter laugh preempts his words. Quiet at first, but rapidly growing louder and more hysterical.
He could have known. He could have known, from the start, and then none of this would have needed to happen—
After a minute, Martin silently gathers Jon up into his arms and holds him close, gently wiping the tears away as his laughter turns into a fit of uncontrollable sobs.
At long last, Jon’s breath evens out again. Martin’s thumb moves in gentle circles over his damp cheekbone.
“Feeling better?” asks Martin softly.
“I could’ve known,” Jon whispers into his shoulder.
Martin’s hand comes to rest against the nape of Jon’s neck, warm and comforting. “Sure,” he says. “Maybe you could’ve. But who’s to say Eli—Jonah wouldn’t have come up with some other way to get you where he wanted you? Gertrude hurt a lot of people—what if, what if Elias had painted her as the villain instead, made you sympathetic to him? Or just started over with a new Archivist, once you’d heard this tape?” He sighs, the movement of his chest pressing Jon tighter into his arms for a moment. “There are a million ways everything could have still gone wrong. You have nothing to blame yourself for. All right? Nothing.”
Jon isn’t quite sure he believes him, but he can’t think of any good counter-arguments, and anyway he’s too tired to argue the point. So instead he sits quietly, still helplessly pondering could-have-beens.
Some time later, Jon looks up at Martin again. “Christ. D’you think anything would have been different, if Jonah had picked Sasha instead of me?”
Martin hums thoughtfully. “I mean, yes and no? Plenty of things would be different, I think. I mean, we probably wouldn’t be here, now. I mean—here in the safehouse. But… well. I can’t help but think…” He takes a deep breath, and lets it out gustily. “El—Jonah picked you, and Sasha died. If he’d picked Sasha, then… then maybe…” His voice cracks, and he doesn’t finish his sentence. Jon lets his head rest against Martin’s shoulder again.
“I’m here,” he says quietly. Inadequately. “It—it’s all already happened. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know,” says Martin. “It just—it all just felt so fragile, for a second. Like if I, if I so much as breathed the wrong way, it would… I dunno. Mess up the whole course of history.”
Jon nods against his shoulder.
“Anyway,” says Martin, audibly wrestling his thoughts back on track. “Sasha was… well. I guess I can’t really trust my memories of her. But all this… I don’t think anyone in your position could’ve been expected to do much better than you.”
“Really?”
“Yes, Jon, really, I’m not… I’m not just saying that.” Martin sighs. “I mean, arguable best-case scenario, she could have turned into another Gertrude. And I’m really, truly not sure that would be better. Gertrude stopped plenty of rituals, sure, but so did you. And I mean, look what happened to everyone around her. Dead, or worse.”
“Look what happened to everyone around me,” mutters Jon bitterly.
“I’m right here, you know,” Martin shoots back, equal parts exasperated and fond. “Very much not dead, very much happy to—to not be.”
“Oh,” Jon mumbles. “Yes. You’re right, of course. And I’m—very grateful for that.”
“Anytime, love,” Martin replies, tired amusement replacing exasperation.
Jon’s stomach takes that opportunity to grumble loudly. Jon himself groans along, a chorus of disgruntlement.
“Did that tape not work?” Martin asks, concerned, not even sounding surprised that Jon’s stomach can register displeasure at his choice of reading material.
“It wasn’t a statement,” says Jon, sighing. He swaps the blank tape back into the recorder, his hands much steadier now that he’s not resisting the pull of the sheaf of paper sitting on the floor in front of him. “I should probably listen to the rest of the tapes in the box at some point, but I don’t know which ones are statements and which aren’t, and honestly…”
“You’d rather eat sooner than later?”
“Precisely,” says Jon, picking up the cover page where it rests beside him on the sofa.
Martin leans over and begins gathering up the rest of the pages, eyes skimming the elegant, loopy handwriting as he tries to put them in order. Then he freezes.
“Martin?”
“This statement has your name in it,” says Martin in a quiet, awful voice.
“What?”
“It—it says—” Martin holds up the paper with a hand that trembles, and reads, “Don’t worry, Jon. You’ll get used to it here, in the world that we have made.” He flips through several more pages. “There’s… more. There’s a lot more. Jon—it says, it says statement of Jonah Magnus.”
The cover page of the statement falls from Jon’s suddenly-nerveless hand, and for a moment there is only silence.
And then, because of course nothing in Jon’s life can be simple, not even mortal danger, his hand starts moving of its own accord toward the cover page.
“Martin,” says Jon urgently, even as he slides off the sofa, hands scrabbling helplessly on the wooden floor, caught between his own will and the pull of the paper. “Martin, you have to burn the statement.”
“What? Jon, are—?”
“Please!” cries Jon. “I’ve heard it now, it’s in my head, I can’t stop, I can’t—”
This time, he is interrupted by his own cry of pain as the fire flares in the hearth. It’s like burning Gerry’s page all over again, but so much worse. Martin frantically looks under the sofa, under the coffee table, hunting for missed pages, while Jon curls up into a ball of misery and struggles not to think about the ink and paper crumbling to ash not ten feet away.
Finally, when the only remnant left is the first page which Jon still holds, Martin holds out his hand. Jon stares at him, shaking, pleading silently for him to realize that Jon cannot willingly relinquish it. He can’t even tell Martin to take it—if he tries to speak, the first words out of his mouth will be “statement begins.”
Finally, Martin’s resolve firms, and he takes hold of Jon’s forearm. There is a bitter struggle while Martin wrestles the paper away, apologizing constantly, while Jon struggles and kicks and screams, unable to control himself, both of them crying all the while.
But as the last of it burns away, the twitchy feeling of being a marionette on strings ebbs as well, and Jon is alone in his skull again, without another person’s story pressing against his mind, demanding to be spoken into the world.
It’s a long time before either of them muster the will to speak.
“Thank you,” whispers Jon finally, and then it’s a deluge, a flood, the breaking of a dam. “Thank you, thank you, thank you—” He muffles his voice against Martin’s chest, but he can’t stop saying it.
Martin takes a shuddering breath and wraps his arms around Jon. His breath is warm in Jon’s hair, and Jon can’t help another rush of tears—not from panic, this time, but from gratitude. If Martin hadn’t been there, hadn’t noticed something was wrong—if he hadn’t been strong enough, or determined enough, to take the last piece from Jon’s hand—
But he had. And now, hopefully, Jon will never have to know what might have been.
A weak laugh bubbles out of Jon’s throat.
“Jon?”
“Speaking of everything going wrong at the drop of a hat,” Jon mutters hoarsely.
Martin lets out a strained chuckle. Then, “What do you think would have happened?”
“I don’t know,” says Jon. “But I’m sure it was nothing good.”
By mutual agreement, Martin locks himself in the bathroom and goes through the remainder of the box the instant the two of them can stand to stop holding onto each other. He emerges several hours later with a pale face and trembling hands, but he puts on a reassuring smile when Jon pokes his head out of the kitchen.
“Anything?” Jon asks, wishing that he didn’t sound quite so desperate for the answer, but unable to conceal the raw need in his voice. The earlier debacle had whetted his appetite, so to speak, and the base of his skull is aching with hunger.
“Nothing,” says Martin, holding out the package. Jon all but snatches it, running his hands eagerly through the contents. With the—whatever-it-was—from earlier out of the way, he can sense the subtle differences between its contents. It feels eerily like navigating a buffet by aroma. Jon picks out a likely candidate, accepts the recorder from Martin, and returns to the sofa. He prefers to record statements alone—he hates feeling more eyes on him during the process—but he has a feeling he’s going to have to get used to company.
When he comes back to himself afterwards, he finds Martin beside him. Two bowls of the soup he’d been halfheartedly preparing to pass the time while Martin had been secluded sit, covered, on the coffee table.
“All done?” asks Martin. At Jon’s nod, he produces a pair of spoons and faded kitchen towels—there aren’t any proper napkins in the house—and presses one of each into Jon’s hands. Jon accepts them without protest; his appetite has always been strongest about half an hour after he reads a statement, these past few months, regardless of how gruesome the details are.
The soup is better than Jon thought it would be. He can’t remember exactly what he put in, and he suspects Martin might have doctored it while Jon had been indisposed, but he doesn’t mind. They don’t talk much over dinner, but he doesn’t mind that, either. The silence is—not exactly comfortable, but it is a comfort nonetheless.
It’s not until they’re lying in bed together, having passed the remainder of the evening in companionable if subdued quiet, that Martin finally speaks up.
“There were other things in the box, too,” he says softly, hand resting on the mattress between them. “Other than statements, I mean. Some of the tapes… well. They were from… before.”
“Before…? Do you mean, from before I became the Archivist?” He frowns. “You don’t mean from before Gertrude’s time, do you?”
“No, I mean…” Martin sighs. “D’you remember the surprise party that, um, that Tim arranged for your birthday? Right after we all got transferred to the archives?”
The memory makes Jon’s chest constrict painfully. “Y—yes. I remember.”
“He, um. He had a recorder. If you recall.”
“I’d forgotten that,” says Jon. He swallows hard.
“El—ah, you-know-who was there too,” says Martin. “So it’s not… totally a pleasant trip down memory lane. But, if you wanted, I was thinking that we could… listen to it. Together. Tomorrow. I only really skimmed through it, so…” Jon can barely make out the motion of his mouth trembling in the gloom, but he can hear the suppressed tears in Martin’s voice as he continues, “I just, I never really… I didn’t really give myself a chance to… to say goodbye, I suppose. To Tim. Or even to Sasha, really. So, I just thought…” He sighs, and takes his hand back, rubbing at his face. “Sorry. It’s stupid.”
“It’s not,” says Jon, too quickly, too loudly. “It’s not,” he repeats more quietly, reaching out to take Martin’s hand. “I’d like that, as well.”
“Okay,” Martin whispers, squeezing Jon’s hand right back.
The sun sets, and the moon rises. The moon sets, and the sun rises. And for one more day, at least, the world does not end.