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bibliocratic · 3 years

Text

litany An exploration on endings. Or: all the ways it could have gone wrong and right.

jonmartin, spoilers for 200, content warnings in the tags

This is not what she thought victory would feel like.

Basira’s fingers tense and smart with overexerted aching when she stops to stretch them out. There is a geography of broken blood-vessels under the bruising that lies puddle-splotched over her hands which scrabble and claw talon-bent at the rubble. They are scored with scratches and tears where her exposed and dust-ruined skin has snagged on fractured brickwork.

She uncovers a foot first, as she pushes up and over the twisted mental of a window frame with an exhausted clatter. A trainer, the white doused with mud, the trailing laces caked stiff and russet. More heaving and hauling, her breath purging from her faster now – maybe, maybe, maybe, but she has lived too long now to believe in miracles. Overturning a fire-blasted section of what could have been once part of the imperious and grand stone stairwell, she reveals the leg the trainer is attached to, pulverised and off-angled by the weight of the collapse, the fabric of it drenched in soot. She peels back a cascade of plasterboard with a grunt, and there is a twisted pelvis, shattered ribs caved in under an acrid-smelling jumper. She’s not surprised at the dull punch of revelation, when she digs out hunched shoulders, coils of hair turned grey-white like swans’ down with the dust.

Martin is obviously dead. She hopes it was quick, fears it was not. His body lying stringless is curved around something, clutching it to him with his bruised and broken fingers. It takes many minutes of labouring, her spine seizing with complaint, sweat pooling at her brow and under her arms, but eventually she reveals Martin’s tender quarry, bundled up against his chest, blood-soaked from a wound long congealed. His own long and bloody fingers clenched and moored into the weft of Martin’s jumper.

She doesn’t need to check his pulse. She is cursed with enough sentiment to do so anyway. Crouching for a moment in the thick of the settling devastation, the fug of dust coating her nostrils, before she murmurs ‘I’m sorry’.

As she stands, she takes off her coat to lay it over them respectfully, the only shroud she can offer.

When her voice is composed, its cracks flattened out, she shouts the others over to tell them to stop searching.

The knife does not go in easily. There is force behind its thrust, a manic wave-shock of hysteric intent, and Jon’s lips part in a gasp as skin and sinew and flesh split. The noise wrenched from Martin is soiled with ruin, tremulous and saw-toothed, and he will never be able to forgive himself.

Jon’s eyes close. Peace of a sort granted to Magnus’ last and most beleaguered of Archivists.

And then they open. All of them, like the unfolding back of petals during blossoming, a meadow’s expanse of sight flowering on his face.

“No,” Martin whispers, the refusal almost lost over the tumult of the building around them. He pulls the knife out, and it drips onto the floor, making damp the material of his trousers. “No, nononononono.”

The wound presses together like lips, and then it is gone.

“I think it’s too late for that, Martin,” the Archivist says in that calm and reasoned voice of his.

It is a surreal, poorly-rendered mirror of before. A way the record of the world has slipped, juddered aground in a repeat. For all they have both changed, outgrown the casings of the people they were, for all they have endured both together and apart, it is a sick homecoming of sorts to stand again a second time round at the entrance to his hospital ward.

She’s brought supermarket flowers bunched in plastic, the last of a bad crop and too late to get the freshest, the stalks of baby’s breath drooping, the petals on the carnations mottled slightly and past their glory days. Jon lies submerged in sleep, the focal point in a placid storm of machines and wires. This coma chemically induced with no inkling of the supernatural, a last-ditch effort by the doctors to reduce the swelling on his brain. To give the body a chance to heal from the damage sustained during the collapse, his frame bludgeoned and punctured like a shrike-caught mouse, the smoke that has snarled like brambles in his lungs. The almost comically neat wound punched into his chest, nicking his heart.

She hopes his sleep is dreamless.

It takes him weeks to wake up.

“… Georgie?” he finally gasps out on an otherwise uneventful Thursday. His vocals are ribbed and scored with smoke damage. He’s sluggish as he blinks and turns and groans at the complaint of his body around him. “What – er?”

“Hey Jon,” she replies. “Good to have you back with us.”

She lets him acclimatise. Without his glasses, he squints and peers owlishly, like an inquisitive bird, absorbed by the novelty of his environment, the mundanity; the hospital-blue curtain that’s been pulled back around his bed, missing a few rungs and so hanging lopsided in places. The wilting flowers on the side table. The IV needles threaded into his arms.

“Did it work?” he asks finally.

“We think so.”

Georgie doesn’t add more. The conversation is one she knew they’d have, but it still feels like stepping out on frozen water. She is waiting for it to give beneath him, for the drop and drown in the unmoored cold.

His relief muddies in increments. His brow crinkling with a frown, glancing around again at the other beds. Their occupants dredged up and out and recovering from their private terrors, bringing the lessons of their landscape with them.

“Where - ?”

He looks up at her. The ice cracking.

“I’m… I’m so sorry, Jon,” she says.

“We made it. L-look, see, we’re – I don’t know where we are exactly, b-but that doesn’t matter, does it, because we’re together, yeah? We’re together and that’s… that’s what we promised.”

The blood is drying on his trembling fingertips, the crevices of his palm, and it flakes off like decaying leaf-fall. The front of his clothes is clogged and sodden, the slick slow to harden. The weight in his arms is making his shoulders scream but he can’t let go.

“We – we did it,” he repeats hollowly. Desperately. “We did it, s-so you can come back now. You can come back. Together, you promised.”

The winds of this new world blow as cold as the old one did, and it is Martin’s only reply.

“It’s for the best, Martin,” the Archivist says.

“Shut up,” his furious watcher snarls. “Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t play st – Like him! Like he would! Using his voice.”

“It’s my voice. It’s me, Martin.”

Martin doesn’t respond to that. Their arguments are cyclical as roundabouts. He tells Martin he loves him. Martin tells him to fuck off.

The place where Jonah Magnus met his End, crumpled up on the dais of the Panopticon, has been cleared of blood. It distressed Martin to look upon, as evidence of his ascension rather than his capacity for brutality, so the servitors saw to its removal. The body he gifted to the mulch of the bone gardens, and the wailing growths flourished beautifully with the nutrients it bore.

The screams beyond the walls of the Panopticon cut off faster as he hastens them towards the End. He observes a world in its twilight. There is still torment, and it is unendurable and unfair but it will end under his reign, for good and for ever, and he will ensure that there is no more.

“You don’t have to stay,” the Archivist says. Considered. Gentle. “I know… seeing me like this is not what you wanted. I want us to be together while it ends, but I won’t force you.”

“And how is it any better out there?”

“It’s not,” he admits. “Here, I can keep you safe. I want you to be safe. I want you to be happy.”

“Well, you fucked up there then,” Martin snaps.

His anger is righteous and flint-spark, makes barriers that almost waylay his grieving. He looks at him, and for a moment, his gaze shakes. He will see nothing less than he expects to see, a man, unkempt from travel, a bit grubby. Coarse hands he has held, lines he has attempted to smooth. In many ways, this makes it worse.

Martin turns away, and the Archivist lets him go.

He needs time and they have more than enough of it now.

He is inconsolable when they dig them out. A horrible, anguished keening like he’s being struck, a gasping that violently gags and stoppers in his chest. His face twisted, blotching, his eyes swollen, and the picture he makes is ugly, rent-open, decimated, bawling into the body he’s crushed up against him. Rag-doll limbed. Ashen.

They can’t make him let go. His cries transform and degrade into wails, garbled wordless, the horizon of language lost. They aren’t even sure if he knows they’re there. The sound pouring out of him is frenzied, delirious and anguished by surviving the unsurvivable alone. He fades hoarse through the ruin he has made of his throat and then he just weeps into Jon’s chest, and still he will not let go.

Melanie’s the one that stops him using the knife the first time. Wrestling it from his grip more out of surprise than shock at Georgie’s shout, and her anger is poisoned with her panic, throwing it to one side and hearing it clatter, snarling that I’m not going to fucking bury both of you, you hear me, don’t even think about it, fuck you, you think this is what he would have wanted, you think we want to lose you too?

Martin doesn’t reply.

They are not fast enough to stop him the second time he tries.

There are two men, strangers to these parts, who moved into the village from elsewhere like seeds caught on breeze. They plant their roots in uneasy soil. They talk to no one, versed in polite but guarded pleasantries, their greeting smiles to-the-point and weathered like coastal walls to withstand even the most inquisitive of questioners.

The one who is tall has the pared-down appearance of someone who has lost a lot of weight through some wasting that gnaws upon him. A gauntness that accentuates the furrows and gulleys and crags of his face, worsens the snow-stark white of his hair. The one who is short has been formed naturally sharp in features, although the brown of his eyes is mellow, prone to distance and otherwise unremarkable. The rumour mill, that tumbles in cycles of chatter that rolls from suspicious to musing, supposes some great and devastating fire to account for the injuries on his hands and the exposed skin of his face and neck, the pocked divots like scattered spark burns, ragged scars from shrapnel of some kind.

The one who is short limps on a sturdy walking stick, fashioned from an oak branch divorced from its tree in a storm. Any travel ventured upon is slow and demonstrably an effort. His free hand clasped in the hand of the one who is tall, who decks himself in layers even in the mildest of weathers, whose eyes are biting as hailstones, awashed grey and framed with bruising as though his dreams are rarely kind.

They re-painted the outer walls of their house last summer, when the temperature wallowed sticky and dense and glorious. The tree in their garden has fruited its first pears, few and stunted but a start that promises better crops come next year.

There is the hope that the strangers are happy.

If they are, it remains nobody’s business but their own.

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