Chapter Text
If anything, the May Day celebrations taking place inside Georgie and Melanie’s maisonette were even more overwhelming than those going on outside. Whereas the packed streets offered a suffocating anonymity, walking into the cramped first-floor sitting room brought with it a claustrophobic sort of familiarity. All eyes turned on Jon as Georgie pulled him in, and he was greeted with cries of surprise at his appearance that he was certain would have sounded strained, disappointed even, had everyone else in the room not been blisteringly drunk. He was, for once, grateful that Melanie didn’t bother with trying to sound pleased that he was there.
“Blast the Eyes, Sims!” she swore as she dug a few coins out of her pocket and dumped them in Basira’s lap.
Basira’s fingers paused in their thoughtful tuning long enough to gather up the coins before they slid to the ground. She gave Jon a characteristic nod and an uncharacteristic little grin, a sure sign that she was well into her cups, before she went back to coaxing a few notes out of the guitar.
The guitar was painfully familiar, a gift to him from Georgie to celebrate his first real job out of school and the start of what they thought would be their lives together. At the time they’d been letting a tiny room, meagre possessions scraped together with the advance Georgie had received from the witch of the End she’d started apprenticing under and the bit of coin Jon’s grandmother could spare. They hadn't had much, yet Georgie had still managed to save up to surprise him, handing him the alderwood instrument with its mother-of-pearl inlay gleaming from the headstock. He’d written a few songs, even performed once or twice on his precious guitar, before his work had subsumed both his free time and his relationship. Seeing the guitar now at the center of the festivities made Jon feel even more out of place, as if it were the one that belonged there and he was little more than the memory attached to it.
He stiffly greeted the others in the room, a mix of coworkers from the Institute, alumni of the school where he and Georgie had met, and a few of the other apprentices and assistants of The End that Georgie worked with. After the third variation of “I know, we’ve met before,” offered upon Jon’s introducing himself, he gave up altogether on pleasantries and fled for the kitchen.
“There you are!” Sasha exclaimed, throwing up both hands and nearly toppling her wine as he entered.
She’d been perched atop the wooden worktable in the center of the kitchen, but slid from it gracelessly in order to throw an arm around Jon’s shoulder.
“I knew you’d make it,” she continued. “D’you see Melanie when you came in? She owes me money now, you know.”
“Good to see you too, Sasha,” Jon replied dryly.
Jon vaguely recognized the few other people gathered in the kitchen - a couple of old classmates who, given how quickly they refilled their wine and slid out to the other room, certainly remembered him, as well as a woman Georgie had introduced to him once as Sarah.
“Jon, this is Sarah,” Sasha said, oblivious to the daggers Sarah was now hurling at him with her eyes. “Sarah was telling me that she’s been helping Georgie with some absolutely fascinating work interpreting the recollections of dead practitioners of The Stranger!”
“We’ve met,” Sarah said icily before downing her wine and slamming the empty goblet on the counter. She stalked out without another word.
As the kitchen door swung closed, Sasha turned to level Jon with a glare far keener than he’d have expected given her state of inebriation. He found that he'd never been quite so interested in the large stone fireplace set into the opposite side of the room.
“So what's the story there?” Sasha asked, voice a shade too intent for the levity at which she was aiming.
Despite himself, Jon felt obligated to answer.
“I, ah, may have insinuated upon our first meeting that Sarah would be better off using her considerable skill in storing the voice in crystals for, ah… for capturing the words of, I believe I said, “real” people.”
It was easy enough to imagine the aghast expression on Sasha’s face from her intake of breath alone.
“Jon!” she admonished. “But she's a witch of The Stranger!”
“I know that now ,” Jon grumbled. Not that it made any better his past transgression of stating that practitioners of The Stranger, the most powerful of whom gave up their bodies to bring spirit to the lifeless forms of scarecrows and dolls and mannequins, were lesser beings than those of flesh and blood.
“Did you apologise?”
Jon made a show of being preoccupied with the wine. The wooden cup he filled was one he hadn't seen before at Georgie’s: finely polished, with a circle of skulls under which sat two crossed knives instead of bones carved around the base. A gift from Melanie, Jon was instantly sure. He took a hasty sip of wine.
“Jon…” Sasha prompted.
His spine stiffened under the ferocity of her stare. Her dark brown eyes, usually jovial, were wide and fixed on him. Sasha had always been one of the few to cut straight to the quick of him, joining Georgie and his grandmother in the number, but the intensity in this moment was unmatched. He resisted the urge to turn away.
“I… explained that I was offering her a compliment,” he finally said in a rather harrumphing sort of way.
Sasha lifted her gaze to the ceiling. It felt as if a weight had all at once been pulled from his shoulders, and he slumped a little against the worktable.
“No, then,” Sasha said with a sigh. Jon offered a noncommittal hum.
They sipped at their wine with only the crackle of the fire in the fireplace to fill the space. Jon could not help but watch Sasha in furtive glimpses. Far from immune to the pageantry of May Day, she'd adorned her black braids with multi-faceted beads in a vibrant green. They glimmered in the firelight as she turned her head, and abruptly Jon was hit with the impression of one thousand winking eyes peering out at him. His sip of wine became a hearty gulp as he tried to swallow his unease. For all that Sasha was, in many ways, Gertrude Robinson’s complete opposite, he was suddenly very reminded of what it felt like to be in her presence.
Jon raced to the end of his cup and snuck another look at Sasha. To his embarrassment her eyes were waiting, a trap sprung, and she snapped his glance right from the air like a dog might snap at a bothersome fly. He felt his ears heat up.
“Go on,” she huffed.
He did not go on, not immediately. Instead, he turned to fiddle with the flagon and poured himself another cup of wine. Much to his disappointment but little to his surprise, Sasha’s attention had not wandered off in the intervening seconds. Her raised eyebrows punctuated her expectation.
“Jon, will you please just tell me what's on your mind?”
It was in an instant as if a bottle of ink, thickly resinous and sootily astringent, had been dumped out over his tongue; he gagged and the words came out.
“Fine,” Jon spat. “I was simply considering how your discerning eye and occasionally frustrating attention to detail will serve you well as Head Archivist. If it comes to it, that is. Of course I'm sure they'll track Gertrude down. But if they don't, you'll make a fine replacement, especially as it seems you're more than proficient with the Beholding’s compulsion. Which I would appreciate you ending, by the way, as compelling me to rattle off whatever is on my mind will undoubtedly lead me to death by embarrassment. The last thing I need is Melanie walking in and hearing everything I think about the man I met on my way over-”
Sasha’s hand flew to her mouth in horror.
“By the Eyes, Jon, I'm so sorry! That's enough, thank you.”
The magic released him with the snap of a heavy book slammed shut. He was almost thankful as Sasha's apologies swept away any need to speak. Jon caught his breath and rinsed out the taste of ink with a particularly large swallow of wine.
“And I really didn't mean to, I wasn't thinking, that was so out of line-”
Jon despised being confronted with the magical workings of Beholding. Despite his employment at the Institute, Jon’s experience with being compelled by Beholding magic had been limited, fortunately, to a few practical demonstrations during his school years and his final interview with Gertrude. Fortunately for Jon, of course, who did not particularly enjoy having his thoughts and feelings so forcefully exposed, but more fortunately for those around him, who enjoyed even less what his thoughts and feelings often had to say about them. But his loathing of that particular branch of magic extended beyond granting its most powerful practitioners the ability to force an answer to any question asked. No, his particular grief with the Beholding was that-
“But can’t you - I mean, I would have thought you would be able to resist the compulsion,” Sasha continued.
Although she’d caught herself in time to avoid phrasing it as a question, she’d still pinned him to the board, leaving him wriggling in helpless obligation to respond.
“I am, ah-” Jon cleared his throat, the incoming truth freely given as acerbic as if it had been compelled from him, “I am not trained in Beholding.”
The surprise in Sasha’s expression would have made him sore had the very spot not been pressed so many times before. Everyone expected fussy, demanding Jonathan Sims of The Watcher King Magnus’ Institute to wield at least some of the Eye’s magic.
“Jon, are you s-” she cut her question short and tried again. “I find that very difficult to believe. You are exceptionally well-read and are highly detail-oriented. I’ve seen your work since we were moved to the Archives: your curiosity leads you to relentlessly pursue answers, even for the oldest and most obscure cases. You’re a natural fit for Beholding.”
“That’s a very kind way of saying I’m a persnickety know-it-all who can’t mind his own business,” Jon said dryly. Perhaps he was a little sore over the whole thing.
Sasha frowned. “You know that’s not what I meant, Jon.”
“Well, despite what many may see as my affinity for the Eye, it turns out that I was far too relentless for the witches and wizards of Beholding willing to take on apprentices and much too impatient for self-study. It wasn’t a barrier when I first began working in the Royal Library system, even with most of my peers being trained in at least the very basics, and by the time the position at the Institute opened up, I suppose I had enough experience for Gertrude to overlook it. I’ve always worked hard to make up for anything I might be lacking, and it’s never impeded my work in any way…”
Suddenly feeling deflated, he let his words limp towards an undefined finish line before meandering away and losing themselves in his wine. When the sip he'd taken stretched past the point of credulity, Jon made a show of turning the cup very slowly in his hands and peering into the wine, as if assessing it for impurities.
“You know, it’s all right if you want the Head Archivist role.”
Startled, Jon’s attention jumped back to Sasha. Whereas before her focus on him had been sharp and considering, it now seemed wine-warm.
“By now you probably know the Archives better than any of us, and you’re working the hardest of all of us,” she continued. “I still think that’s too hard, mind you - I’d rather you not archive yourself to an early death, thanks - but no one can question your work ethic.”
Her words sounded nearly fond, and that made him more uncomfortable than her scrutiny. Jon fought the urge to find Sarah and beg her to teach him how to crawl out of his own skin and escape.
“I doubt Melanie or Basira would agree with your assessment of me,” he deflected dryly.
“Basira likes you and wouldn’t be afraid to set you straight if she thought you were mucking things up. Melanie’s going to be Melanie whether you’re her coworker or her boss or just her friend. If she doesn’t like it she can quit - Eye knows she’s made enough connections doing statement follow-ups, and it’s not like Georgie wouldn’t help her if she needed it.”
It was a clear sign the wine was going to his head that he even briefly considered that he might truly be Head Archivist material or that he and Melanie might be something like friends. He scoffed through his discomfort, fighting the urge to find Sarah and beg her to teach him how to crawl out of his own skin and escape.
“Even if the three of you did agree to work under me, which would make me question if you’d been hit with a curse from the Spiral, I haven’t got the skill with statement givers. Lady Herne isn a testament to that.”
Sasha snorted. “It’s not like Gertrude had a particularly deft and compassionate way with anyone at the Institute.”
“I suppose,” Jon conceded. “But at least she had a significant connection to The Eye.”
“Yes but Jon, are you sure you don’t-”
A filmy feeling coated his mouth in anticipation of answering the magical query; this time Jon couldn’t tell if Sasha intended to stop herself.
“You’re not saying you don’t want the Head Archivist role, are you?” Jon countered, cutting her short.
Sasha blinked hard and Jon felt her magic trickle away.
“Well of course not,” she said. “I want Gertrude back, but if that doesn’t happen then yes, I want to be Head Archivist. But that doesn’t mean you should pretend like you don’t want it too. Even if you’re less qualified on paper, I know that you’d rise to the occasion.”
The look Sasha fixed him with this time was neither penetrating nor tender. It was a queer, questioning sort of look, as if he’d said something she’d heard but not quite understood. This time it was her turn to cover her unsettled feelings with wine.
“Thank you for sparing my feelings, Sasha,” Jon said. “We both know, though, that you’re both more qualified on paper and more capable of dealing with all of the…” he waved vaguely, as if he weren’t bothered by the whole conversation, “interpersonal matters the job entails.”
She nodded, and they both took the time to carefully study their beverages.
After an hour-long minute, Sasha broke the quiet with a little snuffling laugh. Jon would have tensed, had every muscle in his body not already been primed to snap at the slightest strumming.
“Jon, have you ever tried being less…” she began.
It was fortunate that, after years of conditioning with that very phrase, it required little to no mental input for a scowl to leap across Jon’s face. His grandmother, his instructors, Georgie, his coworkers: it hardly seemed to matter to them what Jon was, so long as he was less of it around them.
“Less what?” he said, heading her off. “Less of an arse? Less stiff and uncanny than a practitioner of The Stranger? Less morose and off-putting than those of The Lonely? Less nit-picky and all-judging than a wizard of the Beholding?”
His words, meant to be brisk and unaffected, landed between them with a sad wet plop. Jon’s head swam in a heady mix of wine and humiliation. Knowing not to wield his hurt as a sword and stopping himself from doing so were two entirely different things; he almost always cut himself in the process. It didn't help that the expression on Sasha's face was shifting into something he feared may have been pitying.
“No, Jon. Less afraid to show everyone the real you. I wish you’d let yourself be more you .”
Pity had all the soft crumbling of chalk pressed to hard on a board and was just as grating to Jon’s ears. His face and mood darkened further.
“Oh I have it on good authority that everyone would rather I were less of myself,” he snipped. “If I were any more ‘myself’ I’d wind up that gnarled, bitter old grandfather Melanie seems so keen on calling me.”
“Jon-”
“In fact,” he continued, “it’s getting quite late and it’s plain I'm not equipped for keeping pace. I'll leave the revelry to you lot.”
Before Sasha could respond he was swallowing the last of his wine and skulking out of the kitchen. The woozy hope that she might try to stop him followed him down the hall. Sasha didn't.
Jon fled his bad luck about as well as he did his embarrassment, which was to say, not at all. The strip of hallway from kitchen to sitting room was crowded with all the people his appearance had chased off; had he been in the collecting mood he would have made off with quite the compendium of glares.
He'd almost thought he'd been given a break when he'd made it through the sitting room without attracting Melanie and Georgie’s attention. But then Basira looked up from where she was coaxing notes out of his guitar and spotted him.
“Going home early for once, Sims?” she said in the particular level tone Jon had intuited meant that she was joking.
All eyes turned to him. He froze.
“Ah. Yes. If you'll excuse me-”
“Oh, come on Jon-” and there was Georgie.
“Blast it, Gramps, Imma have to cut-” Melanie glowered drunkenly. Thankfully Basira held out a hand for another deposit of coins before Melanie could get creative with what she wanted to cut off of him.
“Careful, Jon,” Basira said solemnly as she pocketed her won wager, “gets real weird out there May Day after dark.”
Jon nodded stiffly and slipped through the door before Georgie could harangue him to stay.
The night air was chiller than he'd expected, with a touch of heavy damp that was typical only in the early morning streets closest to the riverbank or when Peter Lukas went on a wizard-snatching spree. Where once the street outside Georgie's maisonette had been flooded with revelers, it was now as though a ragged bite had been taken from the crowd beyond her door. Jon watched tipsily as a pair of young women, joined at the arms, came within twenty-or-so steps of Georgie’s front steps only to angle themselves away, seemingly unconsciously, and continue their path in a wide arc. Frozen in place, Jon watched another six pairs of party-goers skirt around Georgie’s front door, as if wary it might pounce.
“Ridiculous,” Jon muttered to himself, though what about the situation was ridiculous was beyond his current mental faculties.
Not about to be intimidated back into the party by a conspicuously empty bit of cobblestone, Jon raised his chin and marched down the stairs with only the slightest of wobbles. It was as his foot touched the bottom step that he noticed the mist pooling in the street. The fog was thin and low, yet perceptible if one were drunker than expected and trying very hard not to show it by staring fixedly at the ground ahead, as Jon now did. It seemed to be gathered in one spot off to the left of the small porch, rippling gently outwards but never fully dissipating.
His heart and stomach jerked in two separate directions. It had been weeks since Gertrude’s archival assistants had been taken by the Lonely. Gertrude's own whereabouts were unknown. Was Lukas now after the newest Archival staff?
All that separated this strange mist from Sasha, Basira, and the others was Georgie’s beetle-black door and him. Perhaps, if it was a threat, he could draw it away.
He took a tentative step down into the street. The fog did not leap out at him, or swirl up and disappear him. It simply sat, foggily, where it was.
Steadying himself, Jon took a determined step away from Georgie’s door. Then another. He glanced behind him in a way that felt surreptitious and found the fog unmoving. Another step. Dressed for May Day as he was, the thin linen of his suit did little to stave off the pocket of cold that Jon was now sure emanated from the mist. He shivered, then called out.
“All the others from the Archives have left already,” Jon lied. “So don't bother waiting around outside Georgie’s. You're too late, I'm the last one out.”
Jon told himself he was imagining the sudden sense that the fog had turned to face him. It was harder to convince himself that the fog wasn't following him as he resolutely plunged back into the May Day crowds.
At first the crowds were, as expected, horrid. As the sun set so had all semblance of order and decency: people whirled in drunken dances and salaciously accosted anyone passing by and cackled and chortled far too loudly for Jon’s liking. A block or so away from Georgie’s, Jon hesitated, considering whether or not he should swallow his discomfort and go back. But at that moment a chill crept up from behind. He turned and caught from between the feet of revelers a glimpse of cobblestone, unoccupied but for a disk of fog. Like in front of Georgie’s house, people stepped around it without seeming to notice. It had, without a doubt, moved from the place he’d first seen it.
Jon whipped back around and continued through the crowd. He thought perhaps he might lose the fog in the crush of people. But no, then it would simply return to loom menacingly outside of Georgie’s.
“Steady then, Sims,” he muttered to himself. “Stay enough ahead to keep yourself from being dragged into the Lonely, but close enough to keep it following.”
Perhaps it was the fog that did it. Or perhaps it was his air of frazzled exhaustion paired with his continued muttering and constant glancing over his shoulder. Whichever it was, it wasn’t long before people were skirting around him , leaving not only a clear path for him to traverse but an equally clear path for the fog to gain on him.
And gain on him it did, billowing as it followed behind. The thud of Jon’s heart was as uneven as his footsteps as he picked up pace, first speeding up, then interspersing little jogging steps between slower stretches, and then finally giving up all pretense and breaking out into a run. The fog, being fog, did not also begin running. Still it seemed to speed up, stretching into a longer, wisping oval to cover more ground.
The intricately carved edifice of the Magnus Institute arose before Jon, making him suddenly aware of the fact that he'd been headed in that direction the entire time. The square outside the Institute was empty - hardly surprising as the Institute, like all royal buildings, was covered in the Eyes of the Watcher King. People tended to avoid the King’s sigil when on their less-than-best behavior, such as on the night of a festival where wine flowed freely. To Jon the sight of The Eyes had never felt like such a relief. Regardless of whatever happened next, whether he was taken by the Lonely or not, he would be witnessed. Jon would not disappear unseen, become another mystery filed away in the messy, moldering Archives.
He pounded up the steps of the building and stopped at the door. His hands shook as he rooted around in his bag for the key. From the corner of his eye, he saw the fog lap up the side of the bottom step.
“Come on, come on,” he panted under his breath, shoving aside quills and ink bottles and books and papers. Jon's fingers curled around the cool metal of the key. The fog… did nothing.
Jon yanked the key out from his bag with a grunt. The lock swam in front of him, naughtily dodging each time he tried to insert the key. Only after he applied his most scathing insults did the keyhole finally give up and submit to being unlocked. His shoulder fell heavy against the door to push open the stubborn, creaking thing.
One look over his shoulder confirmed the fog was still there. Jon paused in the Institute's threshold and turned fully to look down the steps at it.
“Don't think you can just come in here and whisk me away!” he shouted, feeling manic, feeling emboldened. “Piss off!”
The fog pissed off.
As Jon goggled the fog hurried away, not drifting or dissipating but simply speeding off in the opposite direction as if having decided to end the ruse that it might still be regular old mist.
“Right,” Jon said to no one.
The entry hall to The Magnus Institute was silent but for the shuffle of his footsteps and the thudding of his heart. Portraits of every Watcher King from Elias all the way back to the first to bear the title, King Magnus, stared down at Jon with the uncanny green eyes that marked the most powerful practitioners of Beholding. While a certain level of paranoia was to be expected when working at any extension of the Royal University, it was a struggle for Jon to convince himself that he was not being actively watched through those eyes. There was no conceivable reason for the Watcher King to be observing a lone, pitiable, and frankly still soused archival assistant currently creeping through the halls of his place of employment after having been chased through the streets by a scrap of damp cloud.
He expected relief to loosen the fist in his chest as he approached the door that led into the Archives. Instead it tightened, cutting each breath he took in half. The pressure of feeling as though he were being watched intensified. For one mad moment he imagined turning on his heel, scuttling back into the nighttime streets and making his way back to his room, fog be damned.
“What’s so mad about going back to one’s own bed?” he scoffed to himself. “The mad thing would certainly be spending the night of a holiday at work .”
His own words did little to convince him. Almost mechanically he lifted the latch on the door and descended the stairs. Darkness waited thickly for him at the bottom. Still, his body drew him down.
His eyes were slow to adjust, but he'd spent enough late nights in the Archives to fumble his way over to his desk and light the lantern there. The fire’s glow rolled sluggishly across the table. Jon sat and withdrew quill and statement. Try as he might to focus, the words were smudged in the dim. Between the aching of his knees after his run and the hazy impression of trying to read with failing vision, Jon felt suddenly ancient. Still, the work called.
He wished he were more surprised when he heard the wooden creaking of a door.
“Sasha?” Jon asked as he squinted out past the lamplight.
The woman who came into view was not Sasha.
Against the shadows, he could see her torso rise and fall and her legs stir her skirt with the cadence of smooth, controlled steps. Yet he heard no click of heel or shuffle of feet against the Archive's stone floor. The lamp’s weak flicker cast strangely on the silver embroidery of her black brocade dress, making it look as though the strands quivered under the delicate pluckings of fine, dark legs. Even the dress itself seemed to shift in ways that could scarcely be explained away by the woman’s controlled motions. It was as if instead of being made of silk, the dress was woven of thousands of roiling black beads.
“Excuse me, but you shouldn’t be here,” Jon said, annoyance at the unexpected visitor overshadowing the unease prickling at his nape. “The Institute is closed for the May Day holiday. I must have forgotten to lock the door behind me.”
The woman smiled.
“But yet you’re here, Archivist.”
The prickling became a full-on stabbing. Jon ignored it in favor of glaring at the woman. Under other circumstances - less wine, less holidaying, less exhaustion - Jon thought he might have handled the ensuing situation better. Reflecting back on Lady Herne and Sasha’s disappointment, perhaps not.
“I’m not the Archivist and you’re not permitted to be here,” he snapped. “Now please, get out of here and leave me to my work.”
Smile unfaltering, the woman glided closer. Her face was partly obscured by an elaborate veiled hat of silk and tulle and intricate beading. Yet through the gossamer veil her black eyes snared him in their bright, hungry gaze.
“How very rude, Archivist. Don’t you want to take my statement?”
Jon set his quill down and inhaled harshly through his nose.
“Once again, I am not the Archivist. And frankly, I can’t fathom what trivial magical oddity you encountered could seem so pressing as to merit wandering through my door to interrupt my work at midnight during a festival.”
The woman rested a finger on her chin in obviously false contemplation.
“Mmm, no, I suppose you’re not the Archivist yet. That’s why I’m here after all. A true Archivist would have noticed right away that it wasn’t your door that I came through.”
It was then that Jon did notice a number of things: one, that hundreds of glistening filaments trailed like marionette strings from each of the woman’s limbs up up up into the shadows of the ceiling beams where a large and spinning something should not have been able to hide and yet Jon, somehow, knew did; two, that the side of the woman’s face now tipped towards him shone with silvery webs that criss-crossed her dark skin, appearing to hold it in place; and three, that the pain at the back of his neck was not, in fact, the warning twinge of fear but the sting of sharp fingernails resting none-too-gently on his flesh.
From her grin the Witch of the Web must have seen how his eyes widened in fear. He tensed as the long fingernails dug into his skin and a slow chortle burbled up from behind him. The chortle curled up into a giggle, then hitched into a series of tight guffaws, before unwinding into a dizzying laugh. Jon’s head swam with it. It ricocheted off of the floor and insinuated itself between the stacks and caressed the stairs, all without seeming to touch the Witch.
“What do you want?” Jon choked out.
The spiders milling over the Witch’s body, which had all decided to stop pretending to be a dress, froze in unison. Jon could feel their every beady eye affix upon him, could see the twitch of waiting chelicerae. All at once Jon was a child again, standing upon an unfamiliar doorstep, book clutched between two shaking hands as the door began to slowly open.
The Witch of the Web clicked her tongue. “Isn’t it obvious, not-quite-Archivist? I want you to run.”
The fingernails drew back minutely. Jon heard the anticipatory hitch of breath from the thing behind him. His legs pushed him out of his seat though he was certain he hadn’t intended to rise.
He ran.