And Eat It, Too - Chapter Two: Once Upon a (Bad) Dream
In which Jon deals with traumatic dreams, makes a really unwise deal with Michael the Distortion, and pisses Elias right the hell off…
>>> NOW ON AO3!
Listen - Elias is on his bullshit in this one, so be prepared for emotional manipulation, gaslighting, etc.
Also, Jon is having Circus nightmares. The imagery is brief, but could be triggering.
(Masterpost including playlist)
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CHAPTER TWO
The smell of awful flowers wakes him.
Underneath it is something sour, all his own, from who knew how long in the same clothes and the same chair and only luck they let him use the bathroom twice a day. He feels gross. Ready to peel off his own skin, the Circus be damned.
His stomach rumbles. How long—
“A month,” says Elias from somewhere.
No, Jon doesn’t want to deal with him. Keeps his eyes closed. Petty and proud of it, thank you very much.
Elias sighs. “Really, is this necessary? I’d imagine you want to go home and get cleaned up as soon as possible. That won’t happen, however, until we have a little talk.”
I’m at the Institute, Jon thinks, remembering CCTV, remembering Helen, remembering that if he’s here, then someone will have seen him here, and he can be arrested, and he didn’t hurt anyone, and—
“Jon,” says Elias.
“Don’t you ‘Jon,’ me,” he snaps.
“There you are. I’d begun to worry,” Elias drawls.
Jon wonders if he still has the strength to deck him after all, potential broken hands be damned. “Wait. A month?”
“Yes.”
He sits up, room spinning wildly enough to make the Vast happy, and stares. “I was gone a month?”
“I understand you’re upset,” Elias says.
Maybe Jon was wrong. Maybe this was the nightmare, the real Corridors, and he was just going crazy with the worst possible scenario. He sputters, too many words trying to come out all at once and tripping over each other. “Did you even try to find me?”
The force of Elias’ gaze is heavier than Breekon and Hope’s fists. “Of course.”
“Then why didn’t you find me?” Jon sounds like a child, hates it, hates feeling betrayed, abandoned. Replaceable.
Elias sighs. “I’m not omniscient, as much as I would like to be. When you appeared on CCTV in front of the hospital, I was as startled as anyone, and deeply relieved.”
That’s probably all he’s going to get. “Right.” Jon swallows.
Elias rises from the desk and comes around, holding a plate.
Jon’s not done. “Are they coming for me? Police?”
“No. For some mysterious reason, they couldn’t get a good look at your face.” Elias says, absolutely deadpan, and hands him a small pile of finger sandwiches. “Eat something before you pass out. This should be light enough that you can handle it.”
Jon groans and lies back. “No.” This feels bad. Everything is bad. Secretly, he hopes he’s staining the couch beyond repair.
“Really, Jon,” says Elias. “Such childishness.”
“Go to hell,” says Jon.
“Very eloquent. There is a reason I brought you here instead of taking you home.” He places the plate on Jon’s stomach and returns to his desk.
“I’m sure,” mutters Jon, and looks at him again.
Elias smiles, his usual under-the-skin expression that Jon once saw as banal and now knows is anything but. “So very curious to find Miss Richardson alive after all this time. So very curious to see you hand-delivering her to the hospital, practically wrapped in shiny paper and a bow. So very confusing to see you turn around, ignore the medical help that, I daresay, you felt in need of, and walk back into the Spiral’s door.”
Was it an accusation?
It felt like an accusation.
No—it felt like condemnation.
Jon swallows, trying to imagine Gertrude’s end, being shot three times and left to bleed out under the ground, unseen.
He wouldn’t feed me if he wants to kill me, would he?
Maybe it was poisoned. “What are you saying?”
“Merely trying to prompt conversation, during which you will—hopefully—share enough of your experience to indicate where the Unknowing is taking place.”
On one level, that makes sense.
Stopping the Unknowing is the priority. It has to be.
Still.
It was hard not to take this personally.
“It isn’t personal, Jon. We’re running out of time.”
Plastic hands, reaching under his shirt, rubbing lotion on him. “It felt personal.”
Elias ignores that. “I saw you appear on camera like a rabbit from a disreputable hat,” he says. “I was preparing to come to the hospital and help you when you turned around and chose a monster instead of anything reasonable. Jon, I need to know what happened. I need to know I can still trust you.”
Jon gapes at him. “Still trust me?”
“Yes.”
Jon feels like a sputtering tea kettle. “I’m not the one who murdered two people!”
“Yet you are the one we’re all relying on to stop the Unknowing. I cannot replace you, Jon, but if you have been compromised, I need to know now.”
“So just take it from my mind, then!”
Elias sighs. “I could. But what would that accomplish? We already have a fractured working relationship, Jon, and I have no plans to fracture it further. I am trying to work with you, not against.”
Absolutely amazing, the amount of censure Elias was able to put into those words. Jon finally sits up, lifts the sandwiches. Cucumber. Boring. The best thing he’s ever had in his life. “I am not allied with the Spiral,” he says between bites. “Are you out of your mind?”
Instead of answering, Elias lets him eat. He puts a tape recorder on the desk, then folds his fingers and looks at Jon expectantly.
A statement. Of course. “I need to go home.” (This is home.) (No, it’s not.) “I need sleep that isn’t done upright, tied to a chair.”
“Jon—”
“No! No. I shouldn’t even be alive, and I wouldn’t be if a literal monster hadn’t decided to play some sort of game involving promises of my imminent death—“
“Jon.”
“They were going to skin me!”
He’d screamed that.
“Jon.”
Jon stops.
Puts his face in his hands and just tries to breathe.
Elias’ tone is gentle. “I am sorry that I lack your power to make this statement easier on you. That is the ability of an Archivist, and I am not the Archivist. I do know, however, that you will feel better if you give your statement. Our patron will reward and heal you.”
“Right. Not like I can haunt my own repeated dreams, can I?” Jon knows that probably made no sense, and he laughs. It’s a bad sound.
“I’m listening.”
It’s soft.
It’s a command.
Someday, Jon wants to know how Elias can put so much authority into so little.
Jon tries.
Explanation is slow to come. He is tired; he’s pulled on his fledgling skills too much; he’s half-starved. He’s probably in shock. And it’s hard to think around Elias on the best of days.
For some reason, he elides Michael’s statement. What Gertrude did. The sacrifice she made of her assistant.
He also skips Michael’s dialogue toward the end. He doesn’t know why.
But at last, he’s nearly done. “I… Helen was… I had to promise to go back in order to save her, and …” He trails off. “It let me go. I don’t know why. I think I was too tired to entertain it anymore.” He swallows. “I think it might come back.”
Elias sighs. “The Spiral’s entire goal is to leave you fearful because you doubt your own judgements, ideas, and circumstances. Jon. Do you understand why I am concerned that you went back into it willingly?”
“I had to. If I’d lied, it would know.”
“Jon.”
Jon stands, thinks better of it, sits again. “I know. I know, Elias. But it wants to stop the Unknowing, and that matters more than any of the rest of this.”
“Does it?”
“Elias—”
“Here is the hard truth: as much as I would prefer to have options, there is no one else suitable for your role.”
“I—”
“Should you die, go mad, or, say, sacrifice yourself for some stupid woman who doesn’t even know your name, you are condemning us all to the Stranger’s new world.”
“That’s not—”
“It won’t bring Sasha back.”
Jon gasps. Can’t release that breath, not for a long moment.
The words cut him, burn, cauterize all the way down, searing unseen scars.
Elias lets him sit in it.
“That’s… not fair,” Jon finally manages.
“But it is true. I cannot hold your hand through this. I cannot stop you from throwing away the lives of your assistants, your friends, the entire world, if that is what you truly want to do—but I can and will make sure you know the cost.”
Jon stares at the floor. It’s too much. Sasha’s mention has undone him, cut the legs out from under his fight. “Did Gertrude know the cost?” he whispers.
“Gertrude… was very good, in her very limited way. Unfortunately, she became quite adept at hiding herself from me.”
“How awful for you.”
Elias sighs. “She was not a good Archivist, Jon, no matter what you may think. I only let her carry on so long because it made for an excellent distraction while I researched other things. Her violence, her ruthlessness, did not matter, but now things do. You will take risks as you learn. You will be harmed. That is unavoidable. But throwing yourself into death, especially for some woman whose survival changes absolutely nothing, is something I cannot ignore.”
Jon won’t take it back. Won’t apologize. Tries to say that if he stops caring about the Helens of this world, then he won’t be saving anyone but himself.
Nothing comes out.
He’s so tired.
Elias seems happy to see him cowed. “Was there anything else? Any details. Anything about the place where you were held.”
As though he hadn’t just eviscerated his Archivist.
Jon clears his throat. “It was a wax museum. Old, mostly abandoned, I think. I don’t know exactly where.”
“That narrows it down significantly. I’ll have the others start digging.”
“The others. Did… did they look for me?”
“They didn’t know. It wouldn’t have helped matters. Martin’s research, at the very least, would have been sloppier.”
Oh, good, there was more heart yet to cut out of him and boil.
Jon already knows what this means. They all just think I abandoned them, he thinks, and it wouldn’t be unfair, he did before, he went deranged and paranoid before, and nevermind that the Eye did it to him, that Not-Sasha did it to him, made him crazy—that detail didn’t matter.
Jon presses his hands into his eyes. There really wouldn’t be saving any friendships after this.
“I am going to give you some statements,” says Elias, kind now that he’d finished the butchering. “And I am going to call you a cab. Go to bed, Jon. I do not expect you in tomorrow, though you will need to fill out a return-to-work form when you do.”
Jon groans. “Really?”
“Bureaucracy is a little like the Corruption, Jon—ignore it at your own peril.”
That pulls a laugh—unwilling, unsteady, but true. “Maybe you should fill it out yourself.”
“Jon! That would be unethical.” Elias puts a hand over his heart.
He shouldn’t want this easy banter, shouldn’t accept this kindness, but there is nothing else, is there, nothing left that Jon hasn’t burned. “I don’t…” Don’t what? Don’t want to leave the Institute? Don’t want to miss an appointment? Oh, yes, my upcoming murder, he thinks. Speaking of which: “Georgie’s going to kill me,” he mutters.
“Miss Barker has been informed. She is expecting you.”
Jon stiffens. “Informed?”
“Jon, it is eleven o’clock at night. You’ve been unconscious on my couch for two hours. I had more than adequate time to make preparations.”
The image of Elias in the break room, painstakingly slathering cucumber with cream cheese and Worcestershire, feels completely unreal. “You called her?”
Elias sighs. “I didn’t think either of you would appreciate you banging on her door after midnight.”
Again, it makes sense.
Again, it hurts.
He wants to say, Leave her alone!, but it doesn’t come.
Georgie won’t be left alone as long as he’s in proximity. The only way to keep her safe will be to leave.
To put distance between.
Jon grinds his palms into his eyes again.
“Come along, Jon. It’s going to be alright.” Elias is positively gentle as he takes the empty plate and deposits it somewhere.
Jon lets Elias guide him to his feet. Ignores the hand at the small of his back, mutters thanks when his feet stop working and he nearly falls but for Elias’ grip, then goes silent until he’s in the cab and on his way to Georgie.
He hopes the cabbie doesn’t have a working sense of smell.
It was the second time today a monster had been gentle about guiding him to what it wanted. The thought didn’t feel very good.
“Long night, eh?” says the cabbie. “I know the feeling.”
Jon refuses to engage.
#
Georgie lets him eat ramen, lets him promise to explain tomorrow, lets him shower for nearly forty-five minutes, lets him throw his clothes away in a sealed bag (the map has inexplicably smeared, gone to one gray and useless mass), lets him commandeer The Admiral for the night.
The cat doesn’t mind. Purrs, rubs his scent all over Jon, flops onto his lap with expert grace, and doesn’t seem to mind when Jon cries into his fur.
“You don’t care about Gertrude, do you?” He says to the demanding fluffball, pulling his face back as the cat shows his tail. He manages a watery laugh. “I’ll bet she didn’t even like cats. Would’ve thrown you into the Lonely, or something, with a bell around your neck to shatter it.”
The Admiral curls up, still purring, and hides his face against Jon’s thigh.
Jon signs and leans his head against the wall.
He wants to sleep.
He doesn’t want to sleep.
Doesn’t want to wander people’s nightmares tonight.
Elias’ words still hurt, throbbing in his chest as if the blade broke off in there.
“They’d manage,” he tells the cat, “if I didn’t come back. Martin, and the rest. They already did for a month.” He flinches. “Longer than that, if we count the being framed for murder subplot. Don’t think I like this series much. Shall we cancel our subscription?”
But that sounds far more dire than he intended, and he thinks that’s his sign to go to sleep.
He hopes Georgie still cares enough to be mad on his behalf in the morning.
#
Nikola laughing in his face, her own nothing more than wrong indentations, eyes nose mouth moving and uneven and hungry
Jon wakes, panting. Sweating. He goes to the bathroom, washes his face, tries to return to sleep.
Nikola laughing with stolen voice box and spraying him with blood from someone else’s throat
He’s sick this time, heaving over the toilet bowl. Nothing comes up.
Breekon and Hope holding him so tightly it hurts, forcing his head back, bruising his jaw open
The bruises are there on his dark skin, visible once he’d shaved, and he stares at them in the mirror as he shakes and tries to steady himself.
Sarah Baldwin’s stolen face slipping from her plastic head as she pours water down his throat, more and more and more and
Sleep is cursed, he decides, as he wakes choking.
Tells himself he’s free, he’s not being drowned, he’s all right, no one is forcing him down or rubbing him with oil or skinning him alive or looming with stolen faces—
His sob catches him by surprise, and he claps his hands over his mouth, hoping Georgie didn’t hear him in the other room.
“What interesting sounds you make, Archivist,” comes from behind.
Jon flings himself forward, tangles his legs in the sheet, and faceplants on the floor with a thud.
He grunts.
That thump had to wake Georgie. He looks toward the wall.
“Your friend is a very deep sleeper, Archivist,” says Michael, who can’t be here, who shouldn’t be here, who is going to kill him here— ”Do not worry. We are alone. I do like your cat.”
Jon kicks loose the sheets and scrambles to his knees, white-knuckling the bedclothes. “Don’t hurt him!”
Michael is on the bed, on the bed, oh gods, stretched out like it’s waiting for its closeup. A brand-new door looms behind the bed, bright yellow against the outside wall.
(How did it even open? Why did it choose there? Does it make the Spiral happier when the door is against an outside wall and therefore makes you doubt it is an outside wall, after all?)
The Admiral is playing with Michael’s long, curly hair. “I don’t believe you have much left to trade, Archivist,” says Michael, and raises its hand.
Jon gasps, thinks impalement, cruelty, The Admiral’s blood—
Michael pets the cat. Its fingers are too long, jointed in incorrect places, but they tease the Admiral’s back without causing damage. Judging by the purr, the cat likes it.
“What are you doing here?” Jon hisses. “Stop that!” He reaches.
Michael goes still, eyes on his, fingertips dimpling the Admiral’s fur.
Jon freezes, too. Closes his eyes, swallows. “Isn’t it enough you’re going to kill me? That’s not even my cat.”
“But it would hurt you to hurt it,” says Michael.
Oh, gods. “Please.”
Michael sighs. “I am not going to hurt your cat. There would be no point. While some of my ilk began with animal fear, and in fact, still enjoy it, I do not. Your cat’s fear would do nothing for me, and would only upset you. And I’d rather you be upset for… better reasons.”
Jon just stops himself from asking What reasons?
“I would like to talk,” it adds.
“Does talking involve my death?”
“Not tonight, Archivist.” And Michael pats the bed with its long, sharp fingers.
He doesn’t move.
It waits.
Jon shakes as he sits down, as close to the edge as he can manage without falling a second time. He stares at Michael. At Michael’s human face, expressionless except for the eyes.
Whatever looks at him through those eyes is too much, but it would be—the thing that became Michael is much.
How far back should I go? it had said.To the beginning of me? Centuries? Millennia? How do you define the start of your being when, in some ways, you have always been?
The words of Michael’s statement linger in Jon’s mind, teasing. Tickling. “What do you… want to talk about?”
“Our partnership.” Michael says, and grins with far too many teeth.
It’s petting the cat again, and the Admiral clearly likes it. Legends about cats being fay creatures scroll through Jon’s head, but he ignores them. “Partnership? What are you talking about?”
“I have gone out of my way to save your life several times,” Michael points out.
“And then you promised to take it,” Jon snaps.
“Oh, I’m still going to do that,” says Michael cheerfully. “But stopping the Unknowing… as much as it pains me to admit, Archivist, that must come first. I think we can… benefit one another.”
“How? For what purpose? What do you get out of it?” (Why now? What changed? Is it going to kill me the moment we succeed? Is it tricking me to give me back to the Circus? Why would it do that? Why would it do this?)
Michael’s boneless shrug makes the room tilt. “The Unknowing is an emptiness of information, an inability to hold on to even the most basic of things you know. I am a great twisting, a wellspring of lies—but without knowledge to ponder and doubt, I have nothing to twist. I do not care for the world the Stranger brings.”
It makes sense. Jon swallows hard. “So our goals are… aligned?”
“For now. Though as you know, I have another.”
“Revenge against Gertrude.”
Too quick to dodge, Michael pokes its pointed fingertip below Jon’s left eye.
Jon inhales. Freezes. He doesn’t dare move.
“Yes,” says Michael, dragging the tip down, not cutting, not drawing blood, but leaving a strange, tingling sensation in its wake, as though the cells of Jon’s skin are dancing at its touch.
Jon’s shaking is worse. “But Gertrude is dead.”
“Yet I still want it. It is such a contradiction, Archivist! To want a thing that can never be, yet I am the one who makes others yearn for misremembered things. I dislike it. Your employer is here.”
“What?” Jon’s still trying to parse that sentence, trying to ignore the tingle in his skin.
“I visited him first, before I came to see you,” Michael says with great cheer. “I left him a note saying that I wanted to make a deal, and where I was. I suggest you let him in, or his knocking will wake your friend.”
Georgie. She has to get through this night unscathed, has to. I’ll make them chase me and lead them into the park, he thinks wildly, and scrambles for the door.
Elias is there, fist raised to knock, and the look on his face is terrible.
It’s heat like Jude Perry’s fire, weight like Hezekiah Wakeley’s graves, ear-rupturing depth like Fairchild’s sea.
And the moment they lock eyes, it’s gone.
“Jon,” says Elias, lowering his fist. “May I come in?”
Jon makes a sound that wouldn’t qualify in any language and steps aside.
Elias smells like night air, cold and biting, and he ignores Jon as he takes off his fitted coat. He’s carrying a book in one hand—nubbly red leather, with no visible author or title.
“You’re here,” says Jon.
Elias’ look is arid. “Surely the Spiral has not made you doubt your senses to that extent already.”
“No, I mean—” Jon glances at the book Elias is holding. It makes him uneasy. “You don’t… get involved. Other than murdering the elderly, anyway.”
“I am rarely granted such a personal invitation,” says Elias darkly, and shoves the coat at him.
“What did it do?” Jon whispers.
Elias sighs. “Nothing more than annoyances, designed to make one doubt. It shifted all my paintings slightly out of place. Swapped all my spices to the wrong bottles. Turned all my wine to vinegar, as though I had stored it wrong. Some of those bottles were quite old. I was saving them.”
Jon stares at him.
“The actual issue, Jon, is invasion of territory. Your new project has crossed a line.”
The coat is heavy. It smells good. It probably costs more than Georgie’s rent.
“And that book?” says Jon.
“Insurance,” says Elias, and marches for Jon’s borrowed room.
Michael still lies on the bed, but for the first time since the Circus’ grimy warehouse, it looks like the Michael Jon has come to know: grin too wide, fingers tracing patterns that, if followed, induce dizziness, and a body that drapes as if it has no bones.
Its hair is long, golden, and all ringlets, and they are everywhere. Including across Jon’s pillow.
He silently resolves to change the sheets before going back to bed tonight. Assuming he’s alive.
“Well, that is a face I haven’t seen in some time,” says Elias. “What an unexpected surprise, ah—Michael, is it?”
Jon’s heart goes to ice.
He hadn’t told Elias who Michael used to be, who it ate, whose face it wears.
Who it was lashed to.
(Did Elias know him? Did he care? Was he afraid of being sacrificed the same way before his promotion?)
And of course, all the questions about Elias that always linger—
(How did he go from a mediocre pothead to head of the Institute? Why did James Wright pick him? Was Elias ever in danger?)
“He’s threatening to bind me, Archivist,” says Michael, gesturing toward the book. “As if that would make me un-become.”
“I am hardly averse to immediate solutions,” Elias warns, holding the book calmly by his side. “Especially when territory has been trespassed upon.”
Michael giggles, a sound so sharp that Jon has to close his eyes.
Jon wishes he could turn his head off. (Unbecome? Doesn’t it require a map? Is the book a map? Is the book a Leitner? Does Elias have to read it out loud? Is it memorized? Is it like Ex Altiora? What will happen if Elias uses it? Can he do it in time before Michael attacks?)
“Don’t, Elias,” Jon says, and doesn’t know why he says it.
Elias ignores him.
Michael tilts its head (too far, too far), and sighs. “I’ve been trying to decide. Is your Archivist endearing or aggravating? Not that your opinion would change matters, of course.”
“Both, on occasion.”
“I am not,” Jon starts, and is ignored.
“I have come, as requested. And you have yet to make this worth my time,” says Elias in a tone that promises murder, that shoots fear through Jon’s entire system.
Michael laughs.
Jon grips his head, straining to stay on his feet.
Elias stands unruffled. “I’m afraid that is not an acceptable response.”
“I wish to make a deal,” it says. “One which may benefit us both.”
“I am running out of patience.” And Elias has raised the book to waist-height, and Jon doesn’t want to see what it does, doesn’t want to see what happens, doesn’t want to see Michael swooped away in it or obliterated into a thousand pieces or deposited in ice.
He won’t just grab the book, of course. He’s not stupid. “Elias, listen to it, will you?”
Elias looks at him slowly. “Why?”
Jon had only meant it could help with the Unknowing—until Elias said that, and now that he has, Jon decides it’s because Elias doesn’t want to do it. “It may be able to help us. We need help.”
That is a withering look. “I think you should return to work tomorrow, after all, since you’re clearly well enough to do so. You and I will be having a long conversation when you do.” Elias turns back to the monster.
Michael looks fascinated.
“Explain,” says Elias. “This is your final chance.”
“I bring a gift,” says Michael, making patterns in the air that leave hypnotic afterimages.
“A gift?” says Elias.
“Yes, for your Archivist: sleep without his terrible dreams.”
“What?” says Jon.
“That is out of the question,” says Elias.
“Oh, not the chosen dreams of It Knows You,” says Michael. “I have no interest in those, and they strengthen your Archivist—and we both know he needs to be much, much strengthened.” It laughs. “No, I meant… his own.”
Elias looks at Jon.
Jon isn’t sure why he feels cornered. They’re hardly ganging up. “What?”
“Your dreams should not be your own,” says Elias simply. “How long has this been going on?”
Elias knew his dreams were all about other people.
Watching them suffer, watching their statements play out over and over, unable to close his eyes or look away or even apologize when they see him and curse him and beg for help.
“You knew?” snaps Jon. “You knew I was trapped just… staring at people as they suffer their trauma over and over again?”
“Don’t change the subject,” says Elias.
Jon wonders if he could get away with biting him before Elias does whatever that book can do.
“How long, Jon?”
“Tonight. Since the Circus.”
“Hm.” Elias looks back. “Thank you, but we can handle this on our own.”
“I disagree,” says Michael.
“We?” Jon bristles.
“I can help you myself,” says Elias. “This is unnecessary.”
“You have left me to drown and burn and flail in the wind this entire time, and only now that someone else offers a hand, you’re interested?” Jon snarls.
“Shhh,” says Elias. “Ms. Barker is sleeping.” That look. Oh, that look; pointed, eager, expectant. Waiting for Jon to fuck this up like everything else.
Jon hisses through clenched teeth. “Maybe I want its help instead.”
“Jon.”
“It’s saved my life twice.” And promised to take it, but that won’t help his case.
“Jon.”
“It’s done more for me than you have!”
Elias looks like he’s the one considering biting now.
Jon decides to ignore him. “You mean the dream you woke me from,” he says to Michael. “What the Circus did to me.”
“I do.” Michael’s form swirls, and is apparently no longer comfortable for cats. The Admiral drops to the floor with a tiny, four-point thump and trots out the open door.
Jon is relieved. That’s one innocent out of the way. “What would you do to me, then?”
Michael laughs.
Jon sways with it. Vaguely, he’s aware Elias steadies him. (Why? Is he in danger of killing himself on the desk corner? Why would Elias care now, what prompted actual hands-on activity, what happens if he says yes, what happens if he says no—)
“I will make your pointless nightmares seem unreal,” it says. “Your memory will be safe—useless though it is. But when you dream it, when you enter the nightmares, you’ll doubt them. You’ll know that they are… false.”
“But it wasn’t false,” says Jon, quietly. “It happened. It all happened.”
Michael surges up, human form vanishing, and sweeps over to them on impossible limbs and static.
Jon staggers back into the wall with a thump.
Elias stands there, looking directly up at it—but it isn’t looking at him.
It’s looking at Jon.
“You will know that you are not there, Archivist,” it says, looking not even remotely human, its voice coming from inside Jon’s head and underneath his feet and somewhere out in the hall and maybe from Mars. “Your mind—your human mind—lies to you when you sleep. Like me. But you are powerful. If I let you see your dream is untrue, you can pull away and go back to your own little… night job.”
“Jon,” warns Elias. “This is out of the question.”
“They’re not your nightmares,” Jon snaps back. “What happened to, ‘I can’t hold your hand through this’?"
“I won’t harm his mind,” says Michael with something approaching patience. “That would be handing him over to the Stranger, gift-wrapped. Besides—my help will show you I am serious about my offer.”
“Which is what, exactly?” snaps Elias, craning his neck to look up at it.
“I would provide a door,” Michael says.
And Elias pauses.
Jon sees it. He sees it, and locks it away, because he’s sure Elias will deny it later.
“It would hardly be the first time such an alliance has happened,” says Michael. “I seem to recall the Web and the Slaughter working together before, the Lonely and the Web working together, and of course, your own association with the Vast, and the Lonely, and the—”
“What? Since when?” says Jon.
“I would rather keep the Web out of all of this, if possible,” murmurs Elias.
“It’s not.” Michael doesn’t smile when it says those words. Then it drops the inhumanity, swans to the bed, and drapes there, sideways and spineless so it can look at them upside down from the edge. “This is very tiring. No wonder you’re all so mortal. You must burn out, like candles.”
Jon opens his mouth.
Before he can answer, Elias grips his chin, holds him still, studies his eyes.
The bruises hurt. His eyes water. He knows that doesn’t stop this forced perusal.
He has no idea what Elias is looking for. The truth? That he’s desperate, afraid, determined?
And angry. Jon doesn’t mind if Elias knows that. I’m doing it. Don’t try to stop me.
Elias sighs. Then he changes tack. “Jon,” he says, in such an insinuating tone that not even Jon could miss it, “did you invite this thing into your bed?”
And Jon knows it’s a joke, recognizes the glint in Elias’ eyes when he thinks he’s being funny, but cannot help the heat in his face, his chest swelling like an irate frog’s. He wrenches back. “Elias!”
Elias turns back. “He is determined to accept your offer. But you know what this is, yes?” He holds up the book.
“Oh, yes,” says Michael cheerily. “Inasmuch as I know what anything is, when I pay attention.”
“I cannot protect him from his own stupidity,” Elias says, “but I can hurt you. Yes?”
“Yes,” Michael says.
“So we are clear. A truce, for now—with Jon’s extremely stupid choices included—until the Unknowing is done.”
“Yes!” says Michael.
“It’s not your decision!” snaps Jon.
“Hello?” comes from the other side of the wall.
For one second of pure insanity, Jon wonders if he could scruff them both like cats and hurl them from the apartment. He makes violent faces at them. “Sorry, Georgie! Just me.”
A pause. “Did you get another phone?”
“No, I’m… sorry. Bad dreams. Go back to sleep. Work in the morning.”
Silence.
Jon feels sick, lying to her.
Michael hangs there, fingers like dark electric current, weaving patterns in the air.
Elias, on the other hand, is exuding… disappointment. “This was unwise, Jon.”
“I don’t care.”
“One night of bad dreams, and you’re giving permission for a creature of madness to make camp in your head.”
And Jon finally meets his eyes. “Are you going to shoot me over it?”
Elias looks weary, as though Jon’s defiance has drained him. “I wonder, Jon, if you’re not trying to die, as if it would in any way make up for your mistakes.”
He didn’t mention Sasha this time. He didn’t have to.
Jon says nothing.
He’s not trying to die.
That doesn’t mean he deserves good things.
Michael laughs. “Let him sleep. Let him wander his victims’ dreams to his heart’s content—or your master’s, anyway. Then see for yourself if I have damaged your prize.”
“And if I find you have marred him?”
“Then bind me… if you can,” says Michael, a threat, a promise, a lure, a temptation, a warning.
Jon shivers.
“Believe me, I will,” Elias says, and Jon is deeply grateful that was not directed at him.
Michael laughs like Elias made a joke.
Elias’ sigh is long. He looks at Jon.
Jon swallows. Tries to stand taller. Is trembling. Hates it.
“Walk me out,” Elias says.
Jon realizes he’s been clutching the coat like a security blanket, and hands it back.
“Make no mistake,” Elias says quietly as he dons it. “I have no plans to kill you. I value you, Jon. I know of no one who could replace you—and there have been offers.”
“There’ve been what?” says Jon.
“But this is beneath you. This thing is an irritant. It is an insect, looking for blood. I’d thought higher of your reasoning than this.”
It shouldn’t hurt. It does.
But Jon’s jaw hurts, too, where it bruised. “How very disappointing for you.”
“A cease-fire is not an alliance.” Elias pins him, unblinking. “And I meant it—at work tomorrow, bright and early.”
“I can’t. I have to find a new apartment,” Jon says.
“Do it after hours. Goodnight.” And with that (and a more dramatic sweep than necessary), he leaves.
He doesn’t even slam the door.
Jon locks it. And though it feels like walking through cement, returns to the room.
“You agreed fairly quickly, Archivist,” says Michael. “Thank you. I thought I’d have to work harder to convince you. All this reasoning is just awful.”
“I may have done it more at him than anything else,” Jon admits and doesn’t know why he does.
A head-swimming giggle. “Buyer’s remorse?”
“If that’s what you call it after you’ve already pulled the trigger in Russian roulette. I… never mind.”
“Really, Archivist, the things you say!” Michael’s laugh is muffled, for which Jon is grateful. And it pats the bed again, for which he is not.
“I have to…” He flees.
The Admiral, having decided it’s time to eat, no matter that it’s two in the morning, sits by his food bowl in the kitchen and purrs.
“I already fed you, you heathen,” says Jon, but gives him a small portion, anyway.
He spends a minute out there, petting the cat, trying to calm his heart rate.
This was a bad idea. All of this was a bad idea.
“Well, I wouldn’t be me if I weren’t having bad ideas, would I?” he mutters. “Gertrude, I hope you’re happy.”
Gertrude, he has a feeling, would have sacrificed him to something years ago, if only to make the foolishness stop.
Michael is occupying half the bed when he returns.
Jon makes an unhappy sound. “Do you have to do it like that? In the bed? Can’t you just… hover, or something?”
“Sleep is intimate, Archivist, and the work I intend delicate. You are quite powerful. Without my weight behind you, my warmth and my presence, doubtless you would reject my subtle influence to your dreams, leaving you still to suffer.”
“Powerful,” Jon mutters. “Right. Look at me, with all this power.”
Michael just smiles, which is somehow worse than laughing. “I do not plan to change you, Archivist. Not yet.”
Michael lies. The Distortion lies. That’s what it does.
Yet it doesn’t feel like it’s lying now.
It takes every ounce of courage Jon has to go lie down again. “Don’t touch me. And please don’t be here in the morning. I don’t want Georgie to know.”
“Whatever you say, Archivist,” Michael thrums at him in a voice he can feel everywhere, like the tingling from his cheek spread down.
He cannot, he thinks, possibly sleep like this. Aware of it back there, staring at him.
He forgot to change the pillowcase, too.
But exhaustion carries its own balm for moments such as these, and Jon drifts away.
This time, when Nikola shows up with her paring knife already dripping his blood, Michael is behind her, pointing at her ringmaster’s getup and laughing.
Jon laughs, too.
And leaves his own nightmare behind.
(part three)
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