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to find promise of peace (and the solace of rest): a TMA fanfic

Read from the beginning on Tumblr || AO3 || My Website

Chapter 114: May 2018

Martin knew it was going to be a rough day when he woke up to find Tim playing with a prism.

Not that it had been a particularly good week to begin with, or even a particularly good month. The dispassionate aloofness that protected Martin in his dreams had started seriously eroding, and while that was probably a good thing—he’d been really worried about what it meant that he could just watch people, especially people he cared about like Gerry and Naomi, go through the worst days of their lives like it was a television program—it did mean his sleep was a good deal more restless, and he always worried he was going to wake Jon, or hurt him by accident. The progression through the dreams was getting far less orderly, too, and he struggled to figure out what the pattern was, if there was a pattern. If it wasn’t just meant to disorientate him, keep him off balance, and make him just as afraid as the people begging him to help not knowing he was just as helpless as they were.

Besides his petty little personal problems…things were getting bad for everyone else, too. Maybe worse. Melanie and Sasha had turned up Monday morning with the cats and a lingering smell of smoke; they were all fine, and the house had mostly survived, but the interior was a mess and they were going to have to stay in the Archives until her landlord was finished the renovations. Melanie was already betting against him changing the leasehold to say that she couldn’t have pets anymore. Tim had left after work that day and come back with Gerry and Umberto; Martin had assumed he just felt guilty being the only one who got to leave until Gerry and Daisy came up from the tunnels, where they’d been looking for vermin of some kind to satisfy both their hungers, looking shaken and pissed respectively. Gerry had had one of his attacks when Daisy nearly pounced on a particularly juicy-looking spider (her words) and he’d seen the black marks of potential death bloom on her face and chest, and they still weren’t sure what that was all about. That night he’d had a nasty Web-related flashback that they’d spent all of Wednesday searching to see if there was a statement in the Archives that matched.

And every time any of them so much as set a toe outside the Archives, it seemed, there were cobwebs everywhere.

Martin hadn’t heard Gerry’s flashback the night before, since he and Jon had taken to sleeping in the Archivist’s office—Jon refused to let him sleep alone, no matter how bad the nightmares got—but seeing Tim sitting at his desk, shining a tiny pocket torch through a triangular crystal that he was twisting this way and that and watching the colors play across the desk, gave Martin a pretty good idea of what it might have been about. He hadn’t asked, though, not yet anyway. He’d just gone into the break room to make them both some tea.

As he went through the familiar motions, made slightly off by the necessity of avoiding the small brown spider that had apparently taken it into its head to redecorate the shelves for Halloween five months early, he tried to remember the conversation they’d had half a lifetime ago, literally. He’d been on the cusp of fifteen, the lines on his wrists only just beginning to fade into relative invisibility and the rebellion and desire to push back against his mother and Aunt Mary’s treatment and plans for him only just beginning to form, fresh off his first broken heart and ripe for what would turn out to be the best year in chorus he’d ever had. Melanie had just found her niche and started planting the seeds that would eventually lead to Ghost Hunt UK, which she’d once confided she hoped would satisfy the itch of curiosity that fueled the Eye without actually binding her closer to it. And Gerry had been on the verge of adulthood, primed to up stakes and flee to the continent the instant Melanie and Martin were well and truly out of it. They’d all been so…hopeful. It hadn’t been a serious conversation because it wasn’t going to matter much longer, even if they hadn’t started consciously thinking that way yet.

Except, obviously, none of them had made it out. Here he was on the cusp of thirty, and they’d all ended up falling deeper into it—only Melanie was at a point where she even could possibly still walk away, and she was so damn stubborn that she wouldn’t—and Martin vaguely remembered making a comment about how once people who didn’t work for the Institute started calling you Archivist, you were probably in it too deep to be saved. It was darkly funny now, because Martin, who’d never considered himself important for anything to bother with, had somehow become at least the second most powerful servant of the Ceaseless Watcher in existence. And he wasn’t entirely certain he wasn’t more powerful than Elias, although he wasn’t particularly keen to try it.

“Won’t have to, either, as long as the bastard stays put,” he muttered at the spider that was peeking out from between the sugar canister and the powdered milk Hannah and Gail were always arguing over. He didn’t know if it was the same one as before or a new one. “And don’t go getting any ideas. Get out of here while it’s still your choice.”

The spider didn’t move. Martin weighed up the merits of pulling out a bit of the Archivist power versus the possibility that this was just an ordinary spider, then reached for a paper towel to either humanely remove it from the break room or squish it without getting guts all over his fingers. When he looked back up, though, it was gone.

The kettle clicked off with a sound similar enough to the tape recorders that Martin found himself instinctively looking around for where it might be. Then he shook himself back to sense, checked the mugs to ensure they were unoccupied, and busied himself with the tea.

Tim was still playing with the prism, in combination with a crystal ashtray he’d found somewhere. He started in surprise when Martin slid the tea under his nose and looked up. “Martin? What are you doing up?”

“I could ask you the same. It’s two in the morning.” Martin sat down in the chair that had once been his and was now Jon’s. “Nightmares ran their course, and there’s not usually any point in sleeping further once they’re done, I guess. Came out and saw you messing with this.” He nodded at the prism. “Let me guess, Gerry had a flashback to the time we tried to improve on Smirke’s system?”

“Got it in one.” Tim clicked off the torch and set it aside. “I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said—well, what Gerry said you said—about shining light through a prism. I know there’s not a way to put them back together, but…I mean, if you move the torch, all the colors move. There’s no way to move just one. And, I mean, there are only so many colors you can break light into.” He ran his finger over the point of the prism. “You can’t make new colors.”

“You can if you shine light through another prism and combine them. Or look harder at the overlap between the colors.” Martin took a sip of his tea. “I know what you’re thinking, Tim, but…well, the Flesh and the Hunt were just emerging, or at least just emerging in humans, when Smirke started making his classifications. They can splinter off from existing Fears. There’s…Dekker probably isn’t wrong about the Extinction.”

“Do you think Basira is?”

Martin hesitated. “I think Basira has her reasons for trusting Peter Lukas. I just don’t know what they are.”

Tim glanced over his shoulder towards where the trapdoor was, and where he, Gerry, and Daisy tended to bunk down. “Did you tell her what we found out? About how to quit?”

“I told her,” Martin said quietly. “All she said was that if we were planning to go that route, to make sure we submitted a letter of resignation so she could process the severance package. I can’t tell if that was a joke or not. She’s hard to read sometimes.”

What had been obvious, though, was that she was definitely not going to be quitting. Assuming that was even how she had to quit, now that she wasn’t in the Archives, or if she even could; even if the Eye hadn’t been too big on seeing the future, it still wouldn’t give Martin that information. She was absolutely committed to her plan, whatever it was. He still wasn’t sure if she was actually on Peter Lukas’ side or if she was playing some kind of long con on him too, but whatever she was up to, she wouldn’t let anything deviate her from that path.

“Daisy was telling us the other day that she ran into her, too,” Tim said. “Didn’t ask her about quitting, so she said, but…she’s worried she might have lost her way. Basira’s not the kind to give away what she’s planning necessarily, but there were…little things they used to do to reassure one another or communicate when they worked on the force, and she didn’t get any of those. So either she was really paranoid about being overheard, or she’s doing exactly what she says she is—helping Peter Lukas.”

“We don’t…actually know that he’s wrong,” Martin said cautiously. “Or that he’s doing something evil.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“No, I don’t, but Basira might. Or she might believe she’s tempering whatever it is he’s doing. But if she won’t listen—or share—there’s only so much we can do.” Martin sighed. “And if she won’t tell Daisy, she definitely won’t tell the rest of us.”

“She might tell you. She likes you.”

“Liked, past tense. I’m pretty sure she still blames me for what happened to Daisy. And since she wouldn’t have gone over to work with him if Daisy had been here, I think she thinks that’s my fault too.”

Tim snorted and rubbed at his forehead. “You didn’t ask Daisy to sacrifice herself. From what she said, you tried to stop her. It’s why the two of you worked so well together on all that, because you both trusted the other to do what was necessary and keep the rest of them safe. The rest of us, really.”

“I know.” And Martin did know. He’d just expected to be the one doing the sacrificing. “Anyway, I didn’t say it was my fault, I just said Basira blames me. And there’s not really a way to convince her otherwise. She’s…”

“Stubborn? Hard-headed?”

“Tenacious.”

“Same thing.” Tim stifled a sneeze.

“Allergies?” Martin asked sympathetically.

Tim shrugged ruefully. “Stirred up a bit of dust digging out the prism, I guess. I knew I’d seen it around here somewhere, but it had been a while. And it was covered in cobwebs when I did.” He must have seen something in Martin’s expression, because he added, “I’m sure it was innocuous, Mart. I saw it ages ago, and I don’t think anyone has touched it since.”

“You’re probably right, but I’m still suspicious.” Martin nudged the prism lightly. “Although…why would the Web even care? How would it even know?”

“Spiders spinning daydreams in the copses.” The last word opened up into a yawn, which Tim tried to hide behind a hand.

It wasn’t even a good attempt, and Martin didn’t bother pretending he hadn’t seen it. “How much sleep did you actually get last night? Or at all this week?”

“I took a nap yesterday,” Tim said.

“At eleven in the morning. For thirty-seven minutes. And you weren’t so much asleep as sitting with your eyes closed petting the cat.” Martin raised an eyebrow at Tim’s sheepish look, while at the same time mentally tallying it up as a personal win as well as a point in favor of his argument that Tim didn’t call him out on Knowing that, since it was awfully specific and could only have come from the Beholding. “Go lie down, Tim. At least for an hour or two. You need the rest, and Umberto would probably like someone warm to cuddle with.”

“Last I saw he was curled up with Daisy. But okay.” Tim yawned and stood. “Thanks for the tea. Sorry I didn’t drink it.” With that, he lurched over to the trap door. Martin heard a faint mrrp as Umberto, or possibly one of Melanie’s cats, came over to seek the new cuddle buddy, and then all was silent again.

Alone in the dark, Martin stared at the prism. He understood the nature of light better than he had at fifteen, and he understood the Fears a bit better too, or at least he felt like he did. The Ceaseless Watcher was surprisingly reticent on the subject of itself and its fellows.

Or maybe not that surprising. Martin wouldn’t want to give the key to his potential undoing to anyone he didn’t trust not to use it either. Probably the only way to really Know the actual truth was to go through with the Watcher’s Crown, whatever that might have entailed. He was the Archivist, after all; if the ritual didn’t involve him being a…sacrificial lamb or whatever, he would probably be very important in whatever new world was created. There would be no hiding things from him, he thought. No secrets he would not know, no knowledge that could be withheld. All truths, any lies, secrets and strengths and weaknesses, all at his fingertips…

Wait. Those weren’t his thoughts.

Martin winced and drove the heel of his hand into his temple, gritting his teeth as he tried to force the Beholding back into submission. The trouble with getting more powerful, having more safeguards, is that the temptations got bigger and harder to resist, too. He wasn’t the megalomaniac type, he’d never wanted to rule the world or anything, but being in the dark—with a lowercase D, metaphorically speaking—got frustrating at times and it was difficult to resist the urge to just…have that information. The lure of a world where he could, and where he could control the ebb and flow of information, was pretty damn powerful. If Elias was the one trying to set it in motion—or had been, since he didn’t seem able to do much from in prison, even if he had managed to charm himself into a few privileges—then restricting Jon’s, and later Martin’s, access to information, constantly setting them up for situations where having that knowledge would have made all the difference in the world, was probably the most effective method in existence of getting them on his side. If Martin hadn’t had the Archives crew as anchors, it would have been far more difficult not to go to Elias and say look, fine, I know you want to bring the Ceaseless Watcher into this world, tell me what I need to do and I’ll do it.

But he did have the others, and the image of what Jon’s face, or Melanie’s, would look like if he did was enough to make him mentally flip off the Eye and stride off to Peter Lukas’ office to go find himself something for a midnight snack.

Elias’s office, now Peter’s, actually had two parts, the large room in the back Elias had primarily used for storage and the small front room where he’d done his work. Peter used the back room as his primary office, on the rare occasions he was in, and the outer office had been given to Basira. Not that Martin saw either of them very often, but it was easy to see…well, it was easy to tell someone was using it, even if it was completely impersonal, even more than Elias’s office had been. The ledgers and fountain pens were gone, replaced with a squat ivory computer tower and a CRT monitor. The wire cup on the desk was the sort that came in standard office supply kits and contained generic, mass-market pens. The mouse pad was square and blank white with a brand name screen printed on the bottom right corner that was so worn and faded Martin couldn’t read it anymore. There wasn’t even a coat or shawl draped over the back of the chair, and even if it wasn’t that bad up here, Martin knew it was cold in the Lonely. Unless she’d got used to that by now.

There was, however, a spider on the handle to the door to Peter’s office. It moved up the door when Martin looked at it, but he didn’t trust that, and he decided, fuck it, he’d kill this one. He was getting damned tired of the Web and its ilk. Slowly, keeping his eyes on the spider to make sure it didn’t get away before he could, he reached behind him, found the drawer of the desk, slid it open, and reached inside. His fingers found something smooth and solid and heavy-feeling, and as he tried to grip it, something moved.

Click.

The slightly muffled voice that came out of the drawer was Gertrude’s. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Of course I do.” The voice that responded was wholly unfamiliar to Martin.

“Well, that’s a shame.” If Martin had been inclined to doubt Gerry’s memory and his mother’s statement, the tone of voice in which Gertrude delivered that would have left him in no doubt they were related.

Distracted from the spider, he turned, pulled the tape recorder out of the desk, and stopped playback, then rewound it and sat in Basira’s chair. It wasn’t something she was recording, and obviously if she meant for him to listen to it she’d have left it for him. Maybe she hadn’t listened to it herself yet. But, well, he was here, and she wouldn’t be in until the actual working hours started, and it was better to listen up here where he wouldn’t risk waking Jon anyway. He could rewind it when he was done and put it back and no one would be the wiser.

The recorder popped, indicating it had reached the start of the reel, and Martin pushed PLAY.

This time he listened much more carefully to the opening exchange. He heard himself in Gertrude’s words and tone—talking to Breekon, talking to Mustermann, hell, the way he’d spoken to his own mother on her deathbed—and wondered how much was being the Archivist and how much was being related and how much was just coincidence. The thoughts snapped out of his head, though, when she started talking about Agnes.

It wasn’t a proper statement. Not at first. That didn’t start for a bit, and he knew exactly when it did in the small part of him that held on when the Archivist swept over him, because the actual statement unfolded before him in grainy, sketchy black and white, like an animation pencil test being projected through an infrared camera thirty years out of date. But it was compelling in its own way, and in the way of most of Gertrude’s commentary, it answered a few questions and opened up so many more. The man who had once been the head of the Church of the Lightless Flame and later been Jane Prentiss’ landlord was jaded, bitter…and definitely scared. As defiant as he was at first, Martin could practically smell the fear the more Gertrude spoke, and something in him was almost disappointed that the man was dead and this wouldn’t be joining his dreams.

No. No, he definitely didn’t want to dream about this.

The tape clicked off, and Martin drew in a lungful of air, sitting back in Basira’s chair. His hand tightened around the recorder, and he felt the buzzing, at which point it occurred to him that he’d left the tape playing on the desk in front of him. He looked at his hand and, sure enough, there was a more retro recorder than the model that had been in Basira’s desk, recording away. When had he pulled that out?

“Gertrude didn’t mention what she did to Eugene Vanderstock,” he said slowly. “Neither did Arthur Nolan. And I sure as hell haven’t done any digging into it, since this literally just came to my attention. But the Knowledge…is there, whether I want it or not. I don’t want it. I wish I didn’t know what it felt like to be alive as your whole being is infused with grit, how painful that is, but I do. Good to know that works against the Fourteen, anyway. Or some of its agents. I’m not sure how high up in the Lightless Flame Eugene was, or how powerful. Not as powerful as Gertrude, that’s for damned sure, but…”

He stared vacantly at Basira’s recorder, then leaned forward to rewind it for her before sitting back with a sigh. “Hill Top Road,” he mused. “Everything keeps coming back to that. We’ve had so many little threads go towards it that never end up anywhere, so many stories that weave around it. And now this. I-I know it’s a story we knew, sort of, but at the same time…we didn’t know Agnes’ side of it. We still don’t, I guess. I wonder what she thought, growing up there. I wonder if she thought of it as home, or just a place to live. I wonder what made her decide to protect Ronald Sinclair, if it was the whim of a child who wanted to see what would happen or an attempt to prove she was capable of more than causing pain and destruction or just a desire to stop the Web from winning.” He sighed again. “I wonder if it was actually the Lightless Flame’s doing that kept Gertrude alive that long or if it was the bond with Agnes itself. I won’t let myself wonder if my bond with Jon and Gerry is strong enough to keep me safe like that.”

He shook his head and said again, “Hill Top Road. I can’t help but wonder how much centers around that. It’s not just the statements. The matron of the Sunnydene Children’s Home mentioned Mr. Fielding’s halfway house, Gerry and Melanie and I went to that Halloween party there…there have been so many things centered around it. The Web, the Desolation, the Spiral, the Lone—” He stopped and sat up straighter as the knowledge slammed into his head, for the first time in twenty years.

“No,” he breathed. “Not the Lonely. It wasn’t the Lonely that was after me then. It was the Dark. I just assumed it was the Lonely, but…fuck. No wonder those things at the swap meet were so interested in me.”

He sat in stunned silence for a few moments as the implications of that washed over him. He’d been wrong about that all these years. What else was he wrong about at Hill Top Road?

There was an analog clock on the wall, plain and austere. Martin glanced at it and calculated, then stood decisively. “Right. I think this is a thread I need to pull. I can make the next train to Oxford and probably be back before everyone wakes up properly. It’s time to finish this once and for all. I’m heading to Hill Top Road.”

Click. The recorder shut itself off, which Martin took as approval of his plan.

He wasn’t thoroughly stupid. He went back through the Archives and left a note, just in case someone—likely Gerry—woke up before he got back. For just a moment, he hesitated and stepped into his office. Jon was still curled up in their nest of blankets, breathing lightly, looking peaceful and somehow younger than his age in his sleep. The temptation to crawl back under the covers, curl around him, and sleep a little longer was definitely present. Only the certainty that if he didn’t go now Jon would insist on going with him kept him from doing that.

Instead, he knelt down, pressed a gentle, tender kiss to his boyfriend’s forehead, and quietly let himself out of the Archives.

It was early enough that the sun hadn’t come up yet, and the trip to Paddington station was thoroughly uneventful. There was a bit of chaos stemming from the newly set train schedules, but more people lived in Oxford and commuted to work in London than the other way around, so despite everything Martin ended up having the carriage largely to himself, which gave him plenty of space and time to think over his plan.

He didn’t have one.

The shortest route to Hill Top Road from the train station took him straight through the park. Childish superstition warred with stubborn defiance, and in the end, he decided to risk it. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. It could have been that he was too powerful to interest whatever had been here before, it could be that it had long ago left, but more than likely it was just too close to sunrise to be prime hunting grounds for the Dark, despite the clouds and drizzle. Whatever the case, he made it to the other side unmolested.

The house Judith Bradford’s grandfather had owned was gone, which was something of a shock; it had been the largest and most impressive house on the block, and now there was nothing but a slight depression where the basement had once been. Martin stared at it for a moment, letting memory and knowledge mingle. It had burnt down not long after construction on the replacement for the Fielding house had concluded, probably retaliation from the Lightless Flame for the loss of Agnes Montague, possibly just bad luck. Either way, it wasn’t where he was heading and it wasn’t any of his concern.

Still…as he continued on up the road, getting progressively wetter and wishing like hell he’d brought an umbrella, he couldn’t help but think back to the party. He actually hadn’t had a very good time even before Gerry made them leave; he’d spent about half the time avoiding the food so that he didn’t get called names for being fat and the other half of the time avoiding Lizzie van Pelt and Helen—Helen—what was her last name? They’d both been dressed as Anastasia and spent an awful lot of time trying to flirt with him, and since even back then Martin had been quietly in love with one of the older boys in the group he’d been very uncomfortable with it. He’d never much enjoyed the ones from previous years, either, and he’d really only gone because Melanie wanted him to.

There weren’t any good memories on this street. Not his, not Ronald Sinclair’s, not Ivo Lensik’s, not Father Burroughs’, probably not even Agnes’. He wasn’t going to learn anything that didn’t hurt. Why was he doing this?

Because, he thought. Because he couldn’t leave the mystery alone, because it was important to so many Fears, because there was something he didn’t understand. Because he’d felt so strongly that he shouldn’t dig more into Hill Top Road. Because the Web hadn’t tried a ritual yet either, as far as he knew—unless that was what Raymond Fielding had been up to—and the risk of Jon or Sasha being made a keystone of one was too great for him to let things alone. Because—goddamn it, Helen’s last name was Richardson, the onetime real estate agent who’d been taken by the Spiral had been the same pretentious snob who’d decided he would make an ideal partner and had insulted his sister in the bargain. Nobody deserved what she’d got, he thought, but it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person.

Preoccupied with that, he walked up the front path of 105 Hill Top Road and reached for the door.

It wasn’t until he was actually inside the building, neat and well-appointed and sturdy and clean—apart from all the cobwebs—that it occurred to Martin that the door shouldn’t have been open. Nobody lived there—all their research had been very clear on that—and while it didn’t seem to be for sale, there was certainly no reason for it to be unlocked. And yet he’d just…walked in like he owned the place.

A feeling of foreboding crept up his spine. It was not helped by the soft click as the tape recorder he hadn’t realized he’d put back in his pocket clicked on.

Martin pulled it out and spoke into it as quietly as possible. “I’m…in the house. Not the house, of course, the one Raymond Fielding and Agnes Montague lived in burned down years ago, this is a rebuild. But this…this land, this spot, there’s something significant about it. And it invited me in. No…it led me in. I can’t help but recall that in Ronald Sinclair’s statement, he talked about being drawn back in by invisible threads, that he didn’t feel like he was making a choice but he knew it was a thing he was going to do. I’m in much the same boat. I can’t walk away now, but…why not? What’s keeping me here?” He took a deep breath. “I suppose there’s only one way to find out.”

Cautiously, he began moving through the ground floor. Like most fat people, Martin had always been very light on his feet, and like most children who’d grown up in abusive households he had long ago mastered the art of moving quietly without being heard. The building might be ten years old, but it had never been lived in, so the chances of creaky floorboards were slim, and there was every chance he could get through without disturbing…whoever had unlocked the door.

Christ, that was an unsettling thought.

“There’s no obvious basement,” he murmured. “I know that was in the old building, but Anya Villette’s statement suggested there was one in this building, too. I would have thought…” He trailed off, staring at what he’d at first assumed to be a closet. There was…something behind it. Something important.

Slowly, inexorably, both afraid to know what was there and afraid to walk away, Martin reached for the handle of the door. His fingers wrapped around it, and he began, with the same deliberate slowness, to turn it.

A hand clamped over his mouth, and another arm wrapped around his torso, restraining him with surprising strength. He let out a muffled curse and tried to poke his tongue through his lips and lick the hand to get whoever it belonged to to let go, but somehow, his lips wouldn’t part. The hand pressed over them seemed strangely…sticky.

“Sorry about this, Martin,” a voice, low and female and wholly unfamiliar, said directly into his ear. “Can I call you Martin? I’m going to call you Martin. Anyway, I am sorry, but I thought it was high time we had a little…chat. Face to face, as it were.” The person gave a low chuckle. It wasn’t especially sinister, but it nevertheless filled Martin’s entire being with dread. “Step into my parlor.”

#ollie writes fanfic #tma fanfic #the magnus archives #to find promise of peace (and the solace of rest)#martin blackwood #tim stoker #guess who at the end :)#spiders #minor paranoia #manipulation #slight misuse of Beholding powers #mention of fire #kidnapping

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ollieofthebeholder · 3 days

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to find promise of peace (and the solace of rest): a TMA fanfic

Read from the beginning on Tumblr || AO3 || My Website

Chapter 113: July 2003

It’s all too rare they have nights like this. Days, sure, they’ve had plenty of days where they can just be teenagers, but unless they’re off doing something for Gerry’s mum, they usually have to be home early—school in the morning, somewhere they need to be, you name it, Aunt Lily always has an excuse. But Gerry’s mother dragged them down to the South Downs hunting a Leitner that, it turns out, was already sold. Gerry’s mother was ready to blow a gasket until Martin put on the stammering, awkward act, threw in a couple words of Polish, and managed to charm the contact information for the man who purchased it out of the old bookseller. She’s so grateful, or acting so grateful anyway, that she gave them the night off…with the strict injunction that they’re to be to Dover by the first train out so they can head across to Calais, but still, a whole night of freedom. Gerry doesn’t think they’ve had that since the Poland trip.

And this is the perfect place for a night off, or near enough to it. The nearest village is small and doesn’t put out a lot of light, and despite this spot apparently being of interest to a certain variety of tourist, nobody hangs around the downs after dark. Gerry finds an open spot, checks to make sure there are no holes or anthills, and shakes out the old tartan picnic blanket he found in a shop earlier in the day.

“Here,” he says, kneeling down and smoothing out the wrinkles. “This is as good a spot as any.”

“Because you’re suddenly an expert on stargazing.” Nonetheless, Melanie flops down on the blanket and tucks her hands under her head.

Gerry looks up at Martin, just visible in the fading light of the day. “C’mon, Martin, take a load off, yeah? You’ve done a lot today. Let’s just relax for tonight.”

Martin smiles. The last rays of sunset catch his hair and make it sparkle like it’s been been spun out of rubies. “Okay, but if we get in trouble, it’s someone else’s turn to be responsible.”

They lie on their backs, heads close to one another, as darkness spreads towards the horizon and the stars begin to come out in a—for once—cloudless sky. A gentle breeze rustles the beech hanger just over the top of the hill and carries with it the faint scents of summer flowers. Martin folds his hands over his chest, and Gerry curls one arm behind his neck and lets the other rest comfortably in the center of the circle. The moon is nearly gone, and the sweep of the Milky Way gradually becomes visible overhead.

“It’s easy to see how religions get started on a night like this,” Melanie says, a bit dreamily. “That looks like a river you’d expect to see a god sailing on, doesn’t it?”

“Or a road one could walk on,” Gerry agrees. “What do you think, Martin? If you were making a religion, what would you say the Milky Way was?”

Martin hums. “I think…it’s a brush stroke. The first broad, sweeping mark on the canvas of creation. The painting has only just begun, and someday…someday the whole of the firmament will be a complete painting, and when we look at it, we will truly understand what it’s here for.”

“And then what?” Melanie asks, tipping her head back to stare upside-down at her brother.

“And then we find out of the Great Artist brings out a new canvas or wipes this one clean and starts over, I guess.”

“The Age of Turpentine,” Gerry quips.

“Fine, Mr. Rembrandt, how does your religion go?” Martin retorts. “The gods walk the Milk Road…”

“The Starlight Road. No, the Starway,” Gerry corrects himself. “The sun is…a balloon. Yeah, that’s it. Every morning the Lightkeeper selects a new balloon and lets it carry him across the sky while he sleeps, and then he wakes up when it deflates and sets him down. Then he walks the Starway back to the—the balloonery and selects a new one, ready for the next day.”

“Is the reason the nights are longer in winter because it’s cold and takes him longer to walk?” Martin asks.

Gerry sits up briefly, staring at the black line of the horizon. “That’s genius!”

Melanie snickers. “I think the river is…where life comes from. There are two boats that sail along it, the Fisher and the—the Logjammer. The Logjammer is the one responsible for breaking up the clouds and keeping the Heavenly River flowing clear, and when he takes a night off, that’s when it rains. The Fisher is the one who scoops babies out of the stars and takes them to the Night Market, where the storks pick them up and take them to their families.”

Gerry settles back onto the blanket and looks up at the stars again. “Do you think there’s anything out there? Really? Other than the Fears?”

“If there’s not…” Martin somehow shrugs without taking his shoulders off the blanket. “Seems like an awful waste of space.”

“Is the ocean a waste of space, then?”

“There’s life in the ocean,” Martin points out. “Just not human beings.”

“True,” Gerry allows. He sighs contentedly and stares up at the sky. “Hard to imagine people being afraid of something so beautiful, isn’t it?”

“‘I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.’” The surprise is that it’s not Martin that quotes the old poem, but Melanie. They all know it, of course, it’s one of the first ones Martin ever memorized way back when, but still, Melanie’s not usually the one to start quoting.

Still, Gerry has to agree. “If more people lived where they could see how crowded the sky was, I don’t think space would scare them as much.”

“Depends on why, I guess,” Martin says.

Gerry exchanges a frown with Melanie. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” Martin waves a hand at the firmament. “What about space scares people? If it’s the big open space, then yeah, that’s the Vast, and maybe seeing it cluttered with stars will make them feel less afraid. But if it’s how dark it is…okay, yeah, the stars and a full moon would probably ward off the Dark too, but all it takes is a big enough cloud, and if you’re actually up there, the stars are so far apart you wouldn’t be able to see. And then there’s what you said, about wondering if there was anything out there…I could see the Lonely having a hand in it, if you’re afraid that there’s nothing else in the universe. Maybe the Stranger if what you’re afraid of is what is. And, you know, you can’t breathe in space, and the pressure is so high, there’s a good argument to be made that it’s the Buried.”

Gerry blinks. “I…I never thought of that.”

“Well, we keep saying, the damn things overlap.” Martin goes quiet for a moment. “Gerry?”

“Mm?”

“Do you really think there are only fourteen Fears?”

Gerry’s not sure how to answer that. Obviously there are more than fourteen things to be afraid of, but he’s always just sort of…gone with the idea that they all more or less slot into the fourteen major categories. Especially since Martin has only ever seen fourteen different colors on Leitners and those touched by the Fears. But it’s somehow never occurred to him before this very minute that the exact same thing might fit into multiple categories at the same time and also one at a time.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “There’s probably a better way to categorize them than Smirke’s method, but…I’ve never thought about it before.”

“Maybe we can come up with something better,” Melanie suggests. “Like the Dewey Decimal system, or the way they categorize symphonies.”

“I think those might be too specific,” Martin says, a little uncertainly. “Or too restrictive. Or too similar to Smirke’s system, just…breaking it down further. We’d have to come up with something that…allows for overlap, I guess.”

“Hmm.” Gerry taps his thumb against the ground thoughtfully. “I mean. You’re already seeing the colors. Maybe that’s the key to it.”

“How do you mean?”

“Like…like there are all different shades, you know? And they sort of…bleed into each other. Like lilac is a shade of purple, but it’s kind of close to pink, too. And how teal has blue and green, but it’s different than blue-green. Maybe we should be thinking of them by color rather than…”

“I don’t think so,” Martin says. “Like I said, there are so many different things in space to fear, and they all filter into the Fourteen differently.”

“Like stars,” Melanie says.

“I—what?” Martin shoots her a puzzled glance.

Melanie waves at the sky herself. “Well, there are all sorts of constellations, right? And sometimes the bigger constellations have smaller ones inside them, or overlap with them, like how the Big Dipper is only part of Ursa Major and we talk about Orion’s Belt separate from Orion. But there are also stars that are special. Like Betelgeuse and Vega and the North Star and all. And they’re part of constellations, too, mostly. But the same star could be in multiple constellations.”

Martin seems to be mulling that over. “I like it,” he says eventually. “Makes more sense than the colors, anyway.”

“Hey,” Gerry says, but without a lot of heat.

“You know what I mean, Ger. You can’t mix but so many colors together or you get a kind of muddy greenish-brown mess. But Melanie’s right, as long as you’re drawing the lines yourself, the same star can be part of so many pictures.”

“Yeah, I know, just giving her a hard time,” Gerry says. “Anyway, what you said—what if that’s the key to it? Like—like maybe the Fourteen are colors, but it’s how they interact that make the actual Fears. It’s all in how you layer the pigment, and what kind of medium you’re using, you know?”

“Like letters,” Martin agrees. “Or sounds. The aah sound can mean so many different things depending on where it goes in a word, or what letters you combine with it, or how long you draw it out.”

“Or like…choreography,” Melanie says slowly. “I mean, there are only so many basic dance steps, but it’s how you combine them that makes the ballet. Or the waltz, or the samba, or…you get the idea.”

Gerry snorts. “Hell, why don’t we divide it up by taxonomy? Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, subspecies…”

“I think that runs back into the same problem as Smirke’s Fourteen.” Melanie sighs. “We’d still have to limit each thing to a single overall category.”

“Yeah, true.”

“Categorizing anything is hard,” Martin says, and there’s an almost bitter tone to it. “Like saying a tomato is a fruit—it is, but it’s also a vegetable, because ‘fruit’ means one thing in botany and another thing in cooking and ‘vegetable’ is a category that only exists in cooking—and people argue all the time about if potatoes count as vegetables. There are four voice types in choral singing but eight in operatic singing, and they’ve all got subcategories. Fish don’t exist in the scientific community because there’s no way to define ‘fish’ that doesn’t either include things we’ve already decided aren’t fish or exclude things we’ve already decided are fish, but everybody knows what ‘fish’ means, except that Eric at school told me that the Catholic church in the eighteenth century declared that beavers were fish for purposes of being allowed to eat them on Fridays during Lent.”

“So what you’re saying is we’d need a classification system that allowed for nuance,” Melanie says thoughtfully. “Like we were saying before. You give each fragment of something a value or a classification, and then mash them together to give a label to the thing.”

Gerry purses his lips briefly. “You’d need a computer program to keep track of something like that properly, I think.”

They fall silent again. The night gets darker and darker, even as the sky stays lit with stars—not enough to read or see by, but a good deal brighter and clearer than in London. Gerry thinks back to their earlier conversation about religion. With the sky looking like that, he has to admit, it’s hard to concentrate on fear. Easy to believe in things like hope and joy and goodness.

He almost thinks the other two have fallen asleep, and he’s starting to get a bit drowsy himself, when he hears Martin’s voice, so soft it’s almost below their hearing. “What if we’re going in the wrong direction?”

Gerry turns his head to look at Martin. Martin’s eyes are fixed on the sky. There’s something distant in them, though, almost like they’re looking at something beyond the stars…or maybe behind them. They reflect on the lenses of his glasses, and for just a moment, it almost seems like his freckles have turned to stardust. If Gerry didn’t know better, he’d think Martin was getting absorbed by the sky…by the Vast.

But that’s silly. The Vast hasn’t touched him, other than the occasional brush with a Leitner. Martin’s been Marked by the Eye, the Lonely, and the Spiral, but that’s it. He’d know if the Vast had touched him. Surely Martin would tell him.

Wouldn’t he?

He would, a voice whispers in the back of Gerry’s mind. It hasn’t touched him. You’re right. He’s safe from that one so far.

Gerry takes a small, quick breath and tries to refocus on the conversation. “What do you mean, Martin?”

Martin slowly turns his head so that he’s looking at Gerry and Melanie. There’s a faint worry in his eyes. “What if Smirke’s Fourteen are too complicated? I mean…he just liked balance. Everything had to have its opposite, kind of. What if there aren’t fourteen Fears? What if there are fewer?” He blinks a couple times. “What if they’re all just…Fear?”

It’s…an interesting theory, Gerry has to admit, but there’s an obvious flaw in it. “That color thing of yours, remember? You wouldn’t be able to see a difference between them if they were all one thing.”

“If you shine a torch through a prism, and it breaks into different colors, it’s all still light. You’re just seeing different wavelengths.”

“And there’s no way to put them back together,” Melanie says. She rolls over onto her stomach and props herself up on her elbows. “Once light’s gone through a prism, it’s separated into the different colors and that’s the end of it. You can’t mix it back to plain white light. So even if the Fears were all one thing at one point, they sure aren’t now. And there’s no way to mash them back together again.”

“I guess you’re right.” Martin rolls his head to look back up at the sky. “I don’t think we’ll ever be able to understand them. Smarter people than us have tried and failed.”

“Like the Archivist?” Melanie says, lying back down and turning over to look up as well. “Do you think she knows what they’re really about?”

“If she did, I don’t think she’d still be the Archivist,” Gerry says dryly.

Martin sighs. “I don’t think she has a choice. I-I mean, if you live long enough to get a title like the Archivist, you’re probably an Avatar. Like the Twisting Deceit. I don’t think she can get away from it now.”

“Do you think she wants to?” Melanie asks. “Or does she like being…like that?”

“Well, from all the stories we’ve heard, she certainly seems to like fucking with other Fears and blowing things up.” Gerry half sits up, almost convinced he can hear a low, keening, heartbroken moan, but when he listens again, the world is silent save the wind in the beeches. “But I guess…I dunno. I feel like if you’re aware enough to still feel things, even if you’re an Avatar, you aren’t going to enjoy being one. I bet if she had the opportunity to get rid of it, she would.”

“I know I would, if it were me,” Melanie says. “Not that I’m ever going to be that important or, or powerful, you know? But if I was, if I was trapped in something like that and I found out there was a way I could cut the Marks off me? I would.”

“Me, too,” Gerry says. “Nothing’s worth that.”

Martin, surprisingly, doesn’t say anything for a while. Finally, he says slowly, “I’d like to say I would, too, but…I don’t know.”

“You mean you wouldn’t walk away from all this if you could?” Gerry asks, his heart sinking a little. He’ll never abandon Martin and Melanie to this, but there’s a part of him that’s kind of hoped, someday anyway, they might all get out together.

“Oh, yeah, absolutely,” Martin says. “If there’s a way to turn our backs on it all and forget about it, I’ll do that in a heartbeat. I’ve kind of got an idea how to, actually. But…I mean, being able to See the Marks and stuff…I don’t know that I’d stop that, even if I could.”

“I guess it’s useful,” Melanie says, a little uncertainly.

“It’s not that. It’s just…it’s part of who I am, you know? It’s been a part of me since I was eight years old. Would I really still be me if I cut off something that was part of me for so long?”

“Yes, of course,” Melanie says stoutly. “You’ll always be you, no matter what. Even if you, if you scoop out your eyes with grapefruit spoons and set them on fire or something.”

Martin chokes on a laugh. “Grapefruit spoons?”

“They’re a real thing! They’re, they’ve got kind of jagged edges to grip really well, but they’re small and skinny, so they’d be perfect for something like that.” Melanie pauses. “Not that I’m saying you should gouge your eyes out or whatever, just—”

“Yeah, no, I get it, I get it. You’re saying my Marks aren’t what make me…me.”

“Exactly.”

Gerry wonders, for just a moment, what he would be like if he wasn’t touched by any of the Fourteen. Whether he would still be the same person or if he’d be something, someone wholly different. If Martin and Melanie would still love him if he was completely free of it all.

Of course they would, the voice in his head murmurs, sounding infinitely sad, but Gerry isn’t sure he believes it. Still, no good in speculating on it now.

Anyway, it’s immaterial. Like Melanie said, none of them are ever going to be important enough—to any of the Fears—to have to make a decision like that. And even if they do, something tells him it still won’t matter. There probably isn’t any way to actually get free of them.

Well. There is. But there is no way in hell Gerry would ever allow that to happen to his siblings. Or do it to them.

He loves them. He won’t lose them, or let them be taken from him. Not without a serious fight.

#ollie writes fanfic #tma fanfic #the magnus archives #to find promise of peace (and the solace of rest)#gerard keay #martin blackwood #melanie king #minor manipulation #space #religion (kinda)#mention of ennucleation/self-mutilation

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