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Everything falls to pieces for the Archivist the moment he deals the killing blow. He watches the man in front of him—a dozen names run through his head, none of them quite accurate—breath his-its-their last and then for a moment the world shreds itself to ribbons around him.
For a moment he tries to tell himself he’s felt this a hundred times before in the second a tape clicks off, but he knows he is lying just as he Knows what he’s feeling.
A hundred hungry eyes turn to the Archivist and it turns a hundred thousand eyes back at them.
It is burning, the Archivist realizes when it has braided the ribbons of the world into enough strands to think. It is burning, gods above, every inch of its skin and mind on fire with an unquenchable light. And god it still has skin it hasn’t lost that body and those bones it called a home. It can see itself if it looks, a third-person voyeur through its own eyes.
That body twitches when it thinks too hard of it, goes from collapsed on the ground into a pained spasm that lasts a second only. The Archivist thinks it gasps.
While some mindless part of it attends to the body on that floor, most of the Archivist sorts the world. Just haphazardly, simply, a reference catalog to give it room until it can categorize further. It hurts god it hurts, brushing against a viewpoint to order it is like brushing against the sun itself. The Archivist does not think it wants to stop.
The pain is beautiful, looming, wrapped in and tasting of and synonymous with the singing shining joy of its new station. The Archivist has known pain and ecstasy before, can now finally sort all its own memories to classify those feelings, but never at these heights.
A thought passes through the Archivist, climbing down through one braid of reality and exiting on another just as quickly: through those years of willing pain and begrudging helpless love, it always worried over which would win. It never considered that both were integral. Another shudder of terror as it examines its own thought, turns the looking glass inward for a moment.
All of it is focused at the body, the Archivist realizes. A kind of lens for its consciousness, even now. It has more room in its mind now to see the body properly, send it into another spasm and feel the stone floor impact its joints.
That body matters only in how its nerves burn with simultaneous desperate want and overwhelmed horror. The twitch of its smallest finest muscles in rebellion, the bright copper taste of the Archivist biting its own tongue to keep the words in, are what counts.
It bites down harder on that tongue and now can center itself at its body, differentiate this scene from every other. It spits a mouthful of blood and sits up, its back arching in pain for only a second.
“…everything alright? I thought…” Someone has entered and the Archivist notes her whole life in a card catalog as it looks at her.
She needs to leave. It tells her to, in words it hopes she knows.
“I, uh, I’m sorry, but I was—”
Again, then, with more focus this time, “You are dismissed.”
She leaves. It will have time to note her words later. The braids are coming apart, digging at it.
It focuses on them again, weaving them into its loom until one has a magnetism beyond their usual. It hits the Archivist like a brand and its heart leaps.
It doesn’t bite its tongue this time, but the blood still flavors its words.
“Jon?”