#cw discussions of suicide ideation on Dream's part | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

canmom · 4 months

Text

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere 033-048

Previously: 000-012, spinoff post about entropy, 013-032, [all Flower posts]

Someone else died so it's time I write another one of these, eh?

Welcome back to my liveblog of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, a serial web novel by @lurinatftbn. Here I'll be covering the Profane Ambition and The Chosen Children arcs.

So, Flower.

youtube

No, not that flower...

A lot of crazy shit goes down in these chapters! We learn a good deal more about Su, including an impressively believable suicide attempt! Some of that juicy Umineko-style metafictional shit starts sneaking in, even coloured text. Scifi 9/11 happens. Fang is there! And also, on a rather more cosmic level...

...it turns out entropy - the physical principle - is conscious. That's a whole thing.

Then Neferatuen dies.

So, let's take it from the top, stuff that jumped out at me in these sections.

Su flashbacks (cw lots of discussion of suicide!)

If it wasn't already evident, it seems clear by now that Su - the present Su - thinks of herself as having bodyjacked a person, and her goal across this whole affair is to set that right by visiting Samium the egomancer. To the point that she's willing to put just about everyone else in danger for the sake of that mission.

In various flashbacks, we start to get more of a picture here of how Su came to this suicide mission. In chapter 34, we see her growing close to an unnamed friend before she became an arcanist - a friend who found her on the beach during a bullying incident in a previous flashback and gave her a much needed dose of support and trust. It could be Ran, since she seems to fit into Su's life in a similar way? But the narration fairly conspicuously avoids naming this friend, and this friend does not aspire to become an arcanist.

In a later flashback in chapter 45, we see Su - post-arcanist - attempting suicide. Despite the extreme situation, she can't help being Su, going on fairly long digressions about architectural history to explain why she goes about the specific method she does. I found some passages of this, like where Su discusses how she imagines the aftermath of her suicide affecting people and how that affects her choice of method, quite relatable for the time when I was pretty deep in the suicidal ideation hole.

Maybe I should talk a bit about that actually. When I was at university - quite a lot deeper in the rationalist ideology, incidentally - I thought about suicide a lot (I never got so far as actually attempting, thanks in part to the kindness of friends who reached out to me and gave me a different context to exist in).

It's hard to say exactly why I was so convinced I should die, looking back. A lot of it was a sense of guilt, corruption, not deserving to exist? I was failing at uni due to undiagnosed adhd and had my mind full of very demanding social justice principles.

Anyway, I was still dimly aware that there were people like my parents who cared about me and would probably be sad if I died. And I also didn't want to inflict the traumatic event of finding a dead body on someone. So, I somehow convinced myself that it would be best if I were to just disappear. The method I dreamed up to achieve this would be to buy passage on a ferry to France overnight, and then jump off somewhere in the Channel. By the time anyone noticed, I'd likely already be dead. Though I still worried about the possibility that my corpse would wash ashore.

This is obviously completely and utterly bonkers in retrospect. Like, I really thought people would be less upset if they didn't have a body to say goodbye to? But uh, suicidal people aren't exactly in the most rational state of mind.

Suffice to say that when Su talks about the condition her body would be found in as a concern, even while disparaging it as a pointless concern for a suicide, it's kind of relatable lol.

I also appreciate the sheer awkwardness with which the actual attempt is depicted. Suicide is inherently kind of absurd as an operation. The scene ends a little comically - Su comes to the conclusion that she's selfish to want to die, falls off the branch by accident anyway, and then the branch breaks and she lives.

Ran is the one who meets her after the attempt. By this point she's clearly come to care about the current iteration of Su. But in Chapter 46 we learn that Ran is the one who reacted with a great deal of hostility when Su came clean about the whole situation to her, and did a lot to motivate Su's whole quest for self-annihilation.

"I still remember how you acted when we first met," I said, my face cracking into a strange, uneven smile, as I looked away and towards the ground. "When you called me a 'disgusting, perverse piece of filth.' I'd never seen anyone be so mad at me... And the next day, and gave me all those rules I needed to follow..." She didn't say anything. "I was really, really happy, you know? It was such a relief." My body felt like it was becoming very still. "That someone had finally noticed something was wrong. That someone knew how to fix it."

And now, we most explicitly see her getting cold feet...

"If it is what you want to do--" "Yes," I spoke, without even a moment of hesitation. "...then I'm happy," she said, after a moment. "If you really mean that, and it doesn't hurt you, then it's good." It's difficult to completely express how much that was the opposite of what I wanted to hear. The words were like acid poured down my throat. My gut ached with furious revulsion, like it'd been punched by a grown man. "That's disgusting," I said. "Sorry," she said. The word came out stiff, but there was no guilt in it. No shame. shame, it was more like a meeting point between exhaustion and relief. It made it even worse.

And from Ran's point of view... she's spent years with current!Su. Far longer than original!Su. It really seems like she hasn't properly confronted her feelings about this quest.

That said, there's something kinda off about this, isn't there? If we think of them as separate identities, it's not like current!Su asked to be implanted in original!Su's body - and even if current!Ran has been able to better assimilate to her body's memories, she'd be guilty of the exact same crime as Su, just a bit luckier. If anyone could be 'blamed', it would be the doctor. Su's situation would be tragic, but calling her a 'perverse piece of filth'?

Also in this arc we get a flashback of a different sort, in an epistolary format. This comes with a visit from the Playwright and Director to assure us that we can reasonably assume this is a genuine and correctly attributed letter, but we can't necessarily trust that the character writing it will tell the truth. In this case, the doctor who oversaw Su's ascension writes to a friend about Su's failure to assimilate, noting that some third party clearly interfered with the ceremony, and covered their tracks pretty well. (Of course he could just be covering his ass, if he was involved).

The only outstanding hypothesis at this point is that Su's grandfather tried to implant his own identity onto Su, but it didn't 'take' properly. This would explain some other things in this section - we'll come to that later. However, it also seems... unsatisfying, in that the way Su talks about her grandfather really doesn't come across like she's got access to his memories or anything like that.

There's other Weird Shit going on with Su, anyway. Towards the end of this section, Su sees something like a beaked human, hanging out in the ocean, and immediately passes out, skipping a significant chunk of time. Although there's signs that at least one other person has seen this entity, I have no goddamn clue what is going on with that.

Zeno

We get introduced to another couple members of the Order! These two have got the spicier transhuman stuff going on with them.

The first is Zeno, who - it turns out! - has discovered a means to puppetteer multiple bodies, though they retain one 'main' body, it's not a shared consciousness type situation. When we meet them, they're using a girl's body - Su has some gender hangups lol, and refers to Zeno with 'she' or 'he' pronouns depending on embodiment. I'm gonna go with 'they'. Zeno is brusque and overwhelmingly condescending, and seems to be convinced Su is somehow playing the fool by acting like a student who doesn't know what the hell is going on. This is fairly strong support for the idea that Zeno believes Su 'should be' her grandfather in a new body. If not that, then definitely she should know more than she does.

Anyway, Zeno says a bunch of grandiose shit about how they're about to create the Great Work or something.

"Utsushikome of Fusai," she said, her tone suddenly very soft. "Immortality is the least of it. There is a power which sleeps here that will remake the world. That will fold mankind as iron in a furnace, and usher in an age of glory. That will grant our species unfathomable and beautiful dignity, and liberate us from this decomposing corpse of a brane."

Exactly how this will be accomplished they do not condescend to say, because apparently all will be revealed shortly. But, out of a sense of loyalty, they give Su her grandfather's macguffin key to open... something, that will give her the right to benefit from whatever it is they're doing.

I appreciate that Su does her best to try and get some answers from someone determined to spout mysterious bullshit. Zeno is, nevertheless, not forthcoming. Su hates this - both being given shit to do with her granddad, and also Zeno's whole fufufu I'm an evil wizard doing schemes shtick.

So that's one element...

Balthazar again

Before meeting Zeno, Su runs into Balthazar again. For reasons that are inexplicable to her, she feels driven to treat him with hostility and suspicion. She drills him on the exact circumstances of what happened after the prosognostic event, where she thought he'd said 'I kept my promise'. After she pushes too far, Balthazar says...

"Dying Gods, you really are an unfair person, aren't you?" He said, ignoring my question and narrowing his eyes. " Right to the bitter end." My frown turned to confusion. "'Unfair person?'" Bitter end? "I don't like to think of myself as the resentful type," he said, now not seeming to be looking at me at all, "but I have to admit, I can't help but feel a little cheated. To struggle for such a long time, just to be saddled with a role like this, and left to-- Well, to be given to choice to either suck it up, or make the situation even worse. And to not even be allowed a few moments of catharsis as a consolation prize... It's cruel. There's no other word for it."

Then he calls Su 'Shiko', an abbreviation of her name which provokes a severely negative physical reaction in her - she almost vomits. At this point we probably think of the fact that the blacked-out name of Su's grandfather is also five letters.

Balthazar claims not to know something but be operating from context clues. What that implies, not clear. He clearly knows more about the situation than he's letting on. ... OK, unfortunately I think I glimpsed a spoiler suggesting he's aware of the time loop, so I can't claim to have organically guessed that idea, but it would make sense. In that case, maybe his 'promise' was to put himself at risk by causing the prosognostic event, allowing the 'control' scenario to play out correctly?

Still, even if he's aware of the loop, it leaves all kinds of questions about what his deal is. Like why this guy and nobody else?

'So much for your country, I guess'

In chapter 38, Su is helping her classmate Seth carry out a bribe to get Sacnicte not to dob him in for fighting, supposedly. This serves as a chance to introduce us to the existence of the fortified security centre, which has surveillance feeds on most of the facility.

Let's talk a little bit about computers!

We also learn that, in the absence of regular electromagnetism, computers 'logic engines' communicate with each other in this world through a 'logic bridge' which involves yet more Tower of Asphodel iron wonkiness. We have 'false iron' and 'true iron'; false iron can be converted into true iron by the connection to the Tower, which can be initiated by the proximity to a human. True iron can talk to true iron.

The upshot is that computers can't talk to each other unless there's a nearby human at both ends, or the Power is involved, and the power can't operate without human intervention, so it's hard to build automated systems in this world.

The other funky aspect is that, by law, the only type of remote computer connection allowed is basically fully immersive VR, because the old world might have collapsed because kids always be on their damn phones.

Iron had enabled people to communicate in radically unconventional ways, which was perceived to have furthered dehumanization and diminished common empathy. As a result, the law was that remote communication was only permitted if it sensually emulated reality, like what was happening in front of us.

This seems like it would be a very helpful plot point if they ever made a film adaptation of this book lol.

Anyway, Su and Seth take the opportunity to tune in to the parade back home while they're doing the bribe. Of course someone sets it up the bomb.

The kids have a little chat about terrorism - Kam holds forth in her usual way about how deplorable terrorism is, much to everyone's frustration, because nobody exactly is in favour of terrorisms here. Bardiya gives us the 'yes the terrorists are morally responsible but this probably happened because the government fucked everything' angle. Ptolema gives us the 'what if it was a false flag' angle.

Ezekiel

Ezekiel deigns to show up onscreen around here. It turns out there's a reason everyone avoided him so far: he's a colossal cunt who's super fantasy-racist towards people from the other planes, and also regular-racist to people from like, literally any other country. He gets away with it because he's able to put a sock in it somewhat in front of the teachers and also good at magic. I think racists call this 'hiding your power level', but I don't think 'being racist' is some kind of cool chuuni superpower.

Hamilcar

Hamilcar is the last member of the Order that we meet. He's got a bit of a techpriest sorta vibe. His general deal is 'golemancy', meaning in this case an approach of replacing human body parts with interchangeable parts and standard interfaces rather than growing perfectly biomimetic organs with biomancy. Fittingly, he is himself a big old robed cyborg, with a breathing apparatus over his mouth and a metal eye. Definitely feels like he missed his calling as a minor JRPG antagonist.

the cute bit with the books

There's a really good scene in chapter 39 where Ran talks books with Yantho, the younger member of the servants/aspirants who talks with a tablet.

Ran talks, at first with Su, at some length about a fantasy novel about dragons. It is quite a thought-out premise in fact...

Ran shrugged. "When you read enough of this shit, all the gimmicks are basically just window dressing. What's important is imagery. Plate armor, big old-fashioned Rhunbardic castles, swords, fantasy creatures... That's what makes something typical." She yawned. "But anyway, in the actual plot, dragons have almost been hunted to extinction, which is causing a crisis since human civilization uses them for everything. They decide to start farming them instead, but the dragons always tear themselves apart rather than letting themselves be captured, and if they just steal the eggs, they die before hatching without their mother."

They talk about whether the premise - in which a special girl is made into a human dragon hybrid to breed dragons - is overly fetishistic before Ran renders her judgement...

She shrugged. "It's average. As far as I can tell, it's going for a bunch of high-minded themes about transhumanism, the cycle of hatred and violence, and society exploiting the bodies of women… But the actual delivery is pretty muddled, and falls apart amidst a bunch of stuff the author obviously only stuck in because they pressed some personal button. Also, there's a romance plot at the center of the narrative that's really pissing me off."

I like this because it's really funny to talk about the kind of book that you're reading inside the book like this. A lot of the time when fictional characters read books, it's very different books.

I sorta suspect that this is about a trunk novel that Lurina wrote? It's so specific! But maybe she's just really good at cooking up a plausibly interesting fantasy novel on the fly.

Yantho joins in and there's a whole convo about the book series. (Su angsts about how she can't really connect in the same way.) It's definitely kind of indulgent but in a way that, contra Ran's take on 'pressing personal buttons', I quite enjoy.

Fang

Finally in chapter 42 the much-delayed conclave begins and we get to see what everyone's little science projects are! Also Fang shows up.

We were already told a bit about Fang - they're a massive prodigy and also nonbinary - but what we didn't realise is that they are incredibly casual about everything. Very much 'TTRPG player who isn't getting into character' energy. They also act like they're gonna improvise their project at the very last minute.

I thought the earlier discussion of Fang implied there is some kind of recognised nonbinary identity in this world, but it seems to be less of that and more that Fang is really good at playing genderfuck. Here's how Su puts it:

It wasn't as though Fang even really asked people to refer to them in gender neutral terms, not that I would have really had a problem with it if they did-- Although that certainly didn't stop Kam and a few others from being varying degrees of shitty and passive-aggressive over the issue, as you saw back when we were grouping up outside the Aetherbridge. Rather, they just implied their feelings by presenting themselves in a way that was genuinely ambiguous. It's a delicate thing to try to put into words and probably even foolish to think about, but it really was difficult to tell what the... Makeup of their body was, uh, physically. They always wore clothes loose around the chest. They were tall, but not widely built. Their face was soft, but not small. They didn't have any facial hair, but their eyebrows were lower and thicker than you'd normally expect from a woman, and while their voice was pretty husky, it was more resonant and melodic than you'd hear from a man. Like Ran and I, Fang was Saoic - though from the Arcanocracy instead of the League - and a lot of foreigners in our extended social circle would say things like, 'oh, they're Saoic, so of course it's hard to tell!' which, aside from being vaguely offensive, was also extremely irritating, since I didn't feel like that had anything to do with it.

Su goes on for a few more paragraphs about how we parse gender and shit.

It's funny to me because... I'm someone who apparently reads a bit ambiguously in terms of gender. In my experience, people decide fairly arbitrarily what gender they think you are, and if something comes to change that impression (for me, usually my voice), they 'correct' themselves. If they're more caught up on trans shit they might ask pronouns or whatever. It's rare for someone to decide that they can't figure it out -and if they do they might be incredibly rude about it like demanding to know my gender or loudly talking about whether I'm a boy or a girl.

Fang apparently deliberately cultivates a nonbinary perception, undermining peoples' assumptions, but keeps subtle with it and doesn't actually ask anyone to use they/them. That's a hell of a fine line to walk lol.

Fang's prodigal talent also has an air of cheating to it. After some remarks from Su about how most 'prodigies' just happen to peak sooner than most (she puts an evopsych spin on this because Su is a bit too much of a lesswronger for her own good still), but aren't lifelong special talents, Su describes how Fang stood apart in schoolwork:

That wasn't how it went for them. They would come into class, sit down, and just write. Nonstop, without pausing even a second for thought. And the work was brilliant! Perfectly voiced, cited, and comprehensive to the point that it put even the wordiest of Kamrusepa's stuff to shame! And they just did it, like they were transcribing directly from the voice of God.

Certainly can't help but get the feeling that Fang might also be in on the time loop, or perhaps an even longer loop? Or maybe they have had their mind overwritten with someone as we're suspecting happened to Su? Or receiving some kind of 'external' information? Definitely seems like there's more to this than just 'Fang is good at academia'.

Anyway, they are super casual about showing up late for this all important conclave. Su's deja-vu feeling manifests into a highly specific prediction...

Fang will withdraw an item that looks like a sheathed blade, but covered in small pieces of strange, silver-white machinery. As soon as the inner circle sees it, they will react with shock and panic. Someone - in 87% of scenarios, Zeno, but sometimes Hamilcar, Anna or even Linos - will demand what they're doing with it and where they got it. Fang will explain that they were entrusted with the task of completing it by a departed member of the order, though they won't say who. Later, I will learn this was my grandfather, but that won't be until half way through the night. After this, the conclave will demand they hand the item over, but Fang will only do this under the condition they stall the conference until they've led everyone down to the sublevel to reveal its purpose. Kamrusepa will get upset and refuse to go. We'll travel to an elevator that goes deeper in the facility, and... And then...

This prediction does not exactly pan out, but we don't actually get to see what Fang's project is, because Hamilcar suddenly intervenes and sends everyone outside.

Some other shit happens before that though!

Ophelia's presentation is the main one to be narrated in detail. She's invented an external artificial liver which is kind of like a slug creature, and does a demo on herself, in which it pokes tentacles in to intercept heir failing liver. I feel like this thing is a Chekhov's gun. Also I am big into Ophelia's whole 'I will do this gross experiment on myself' thing. That's the spirit.

The witch's ultimatum

We get the equivalent of Beatrice's letter. In this case, someone hacks Kam's logic bridge during her presentation, giving a religiously inflected denouncement and ultimatum on behalf of an unnamed goddess. The message commands them to do some occult shit.

First, you shall lay this fel sanctum to waste, taking nothing with you as you abandon it save the clothes on your back! Second, you shall fall to your knees and prostrate yourself before Her glory from the break of dawn to high noon! Third, you shall make the traditional sacrifice of a black bull in the evening light, along with the proper rites! Do this, and turn your miserable lives towards virtue and godliness, and you may yet be afforded forgiveness."

If not, they'll all be killed one by one. We don't have a specific recipe for the killings as Beatrice's revival ritual in Umineko, but it's definitely a Beatricey vibe.

Su, who is one of the only two people who actually knows someone has been murdered (besides, presumably, the murderer!), has more misgivings than the rest, who broadly laugh it off.

There's also a moment of bathos at the end...

Then, the voice exhaled, and the head of the figure shifted to the side, jarringly shifting to casual, chipper tone. "That was pretty good! I really gave it my all, I think--"

Given that the Playwright later claims to have had a cameo, I'm inclined to think it's her 'playing' this ultimatum-giver? Though what that means for the 'integrity' of the scenario I'm not sure!

And then things get crazy

During this recess, Neferuaten comes out to chat with Su and Ran and Ptolema. Ran decides to take the chance to grill her on the real purpose of the facility, because most of what we've been told about it doesn't add up. It probably isn't underwater on the next lower plane. She concludes that the real reason for building a bunch of underwater domes here is something hidden in the caves underneath.

Neferuaten's answer is... to go on a long metaphysical tangent. So it turns out that before making this new universe, the humans in the 'timeless' space of the Tower of Asphodel made some observations of the 'depressed' physics of the post-collapse universe they'd left (seems like the commenters suggesting false vacuum collapse were probably right on the money). They essentially had to wait out the entire heat death of the universe before making a new one (presumably taking no subjective time). So they left some kind of monitoring devices in there creating effectively a complete record of the entire history of the old universe. It's considered a niche interest.

Someone called Saahdia made a study of this data and discovered patterns.

"Of course, I'm simplifying something very complex. One thing I hope you've learned by this point is that, in all forms of scholarly inquiry, nothing is ever clear cut. There were many false positives, and natural occurrences mistaken for something more. But the further she invesigated, the more she found anomalies which could not be easily explained. And the more those anomalies, too, began to form a recognizable pattern." She smiled distantly. "Just not one you usually see in interstellar physics. And then she reported that to Ubar, who ordered an investigation of the corresponding interplanar data--" (...) "What she started to suspect," Neferuaten explained. "was that, though in a form impossibly alien to human beings, entropy is conscious."

This is like... lmao crank shit but it's fine, it's a scifi story, we can have a little conscious entropy as a treat.

Still, it's time to talk physics a bit.

Seems that post I wrote about entropy is going to be very relevant huh. As discussed previously, entropy is a fairly unintuitive quantity that measures how large-scale averaged out models of a system relate to fully specifying every single one of its degrees of freedom.

The 'thermodynamic arrow of time' says that, in the direction we define to be increasing time, entropy always increases. This is justified by a statistical argument: when you have a huge enough number of particles ergodically exploring the states of a system, there are so vastly many more ways for entropy to increase than for it to not increase that the chance of it not increasing is infinitesimal. (This simple argument is considerably complicated by the issue of CPT symmetry, which says the laws of physics work the same way if you run time backwards. That would be too long a tangent for this blog post about a book.)

In thermodynamics, entropy is one of a number of state variables that describe a system. In classical thermodynamics, you form differential equations, relating changes in entropy to changes in other quantities such as internal energy, temperature, volume etc.

So what is entropy? Well, it's not some kind of cosmic processor that is monitoring the micro-level physics of everything. It's a statistical property that crops up in complicated evolving systems.

In our world, that is. In Su's world, entropy is some kind of god. So that's neat.

Naturally all the characters raise similar objections. Here's how Su describes known physics in her future:

"Um…" I said, hesitating as I was put on the spot despite the superficial simplicity of the question. "Well, as far as we know, the Timeless Realm, which contains all fundamental matter, has always existed - along with the 10 conventional dimensional forces, which intersect and overlap with each other around the matter. Some of those intersections were asymmetrical, creating instability and the 11th special dimensional force, time. The process of those intersections breaking down created the phenomena we describe as energy and mass, which at some point led to the first planes. Ours in particular came about when a large amount of energy was discharged from from somewhere else in the inter-dimensional landscape, and--"

We should probably talk a bit about dimensions here. A spatial dimension is basically an direction that something can vary, orthogonal to the other directions. e.g. to reach every point in a 3D space you need at least three non-coplanar basis vectors to add up. In a higher dimensional space, there are more directions to go in.

Mathematics has been describing higher dimensional geometry for centuries. This made its way back to physics around the turn of the 20th century. You had special relativity, which mixes space and time depending on your velocity, defining a 4D 'spacetime'. You also had formulations like Lagrangian mechanics which reformulated Newton's mechanics into a more abstract model of 'state variables', with as many as you'd need to solve your problem.

Much later in the 20th century, attempts to create a unified model of quantum field theory and gravity started observing that their theory could be really mathematically elegant if you added a bunch of extra spacetime dimensions. The problem was that we can't observe these dimensions - we can't move along them and they don't have any observable effect on shit like gravity. A solution for this issue is to say that all these extra space dimensions might loop back on themselves over an incredibly tiny scale. Supersymmetric string theory supposes that there would be 10 dimensions (the 4 regular spacetime ones + 6 extra ones which are all twisted up in something called a Calabi-Yau manifold), other theories add more.

I should say here that, despite decades of research effort and increasingly gigantic particle accelerators, we have found zero evidence for supersymmetry, which makes things dicey for string theory - a body of theoretical work that was already hard to meaningfully test in the first place. So '10 spacetime dimensions' is far from proven physics.

While I'm at it, since it's come up, a brane is basically a hypersurface of some dimension, that propagates through a higher-dimensional space. It's a generalisation of notions like 'particle' (point moving through spacetime) and 'string' (line moving through spacetime). String theory uses this mathematical construct heavily - notably, within string theory our universe could be a specific type of brane with various strings attached to it in a way that allows it to produce quantum mechanics from the way the strings and branes interact.

So, in Flower, the 'planes' seem to have been identified with the physics concept of 'brane'. In practice they function more like the classical fantasy notion of 'planes of existence', other worlds that you can travel to where the rules are different.

Now, let's go back to Su's summary. I don't really get what she means by 'dimensional forces' here, particularly when she describes time as a 'force'. The 'process of those intersections breaking down' is probably a way of describing the Higgs mechanism and spontaneous symmetry breaking. The 'large amount of energy' is presumably a reference to the Big Bang (the hot dense state at the beginning of our universe), coupled with the idea that the energy came from 'somewhere else'. Further, Su seems to be suggesting that they exist in a brane cosmology, in which our universe is a brane in a higher-dimensional space, and there could be other universes.

Su's description is kinda muddled tbh - it feels like the interpolation of someone who reads popular science magazines rather than a physicist.

Anyway, here's how Su defines entropy:

"But we do know what entropy is," I insisted. "It's just an emergent quality of energy in some planes in which gravity is exceeded by motion in terms of potential force, without anything else to taper it. You taught me that countless times yourself."

This seems somewhat odd to me - I'm not entirely sure why gravity would enter into it. I think it might have to do with conflating the thermodynamic arrow of time (the 'direction' along which entropy increases) and the cosmological arrow of time (the 'direction' in which the universe expands), since the expansion of the universe is determined by the balance of matter and energy in the universe.

'Emergent quality of energy' is somewhat accurate. Entropy could be more aptly said to be an emergent quality of any model that treats matter in the aggregate, abstracting over details. An atom in a gas interacting with other atoms has no concept of entropy in its dynamics. If you were able to perfectly track and simulate every single particle, you would not need entropy.

Since it's so contextually defined, it's rather difficult to describe entropy as a kind of entity that could be afforded a will. Neferuaten's response is to play the allegory of the cave card, something which Ran calls her on:

"This is the second time in the past five minutes that you've basically repackaged the allegory of the cave and presented it as your own concept," Ran said flatly. "Just putting that out there."

Kind of love this line.

However, despite the characters grilling Neferatuen on an idea which Su correctly calls 'closer to mysticism than natural philosophy', the fact that this is given so much time in the narrative seems to fairly strongly suggest that, as far as this story is concerned, entropy is a conscious entity or process or something.

Presumably, whatever the Order are about to try to do, they're going to change how entropy behaves so that it 'wants' to keep humans alive indefinitely. Somehow this is going to involve the Everblossom. I will say, that is a proper scale of magnum opus for a setting like this.

Neferuaten is honestly pretty up front about all this. She's like 'yep we're playing with fire and probably courting an x-risk*, but don't worry, we know what we're doing'.

"I'm just trying to be upfront, miss Rheeds," Neferuaten said. "I'm happy to be known as hypocritical, selfish, or even foolish, but the one thing that makes my stomach churn is the idea of miss Hoa-Trinh, and of course you and Utsuhikome, walking away from this conversation with the impression that we're all megalomaniacs without any degree of mindfulness of we're doing. It has been, if nothing else, among my foremost goals to promote self-awareness among the administration of this organization."

As upfront as she might be trying to be, she lapses back into the cryptic bullshit and refuses to explain much more about how the Order came to this mysterious location beyond 'there is an Ironworker thing here' that they can use to observe and interact with entropy, I guess.

Anyway, all of this ends with Neferuaten declaring that as long as she lives, no danger will come to Su et al. Signing her own death warrant with those words.

Neferuaten dies

So then Su sees the beaky thing and blacks out. When she comes to, she tries to figure out what she saw - about this point we also get another visit from the Playwright, who explains that Su can't have her perceptions messed with until we are shown the mechanism that would do it - and then Lilith shows up and drags her to go find help. The warning bell is going off. Su goes to shut it off. And we get... our second death!!

Su also learns that as far as other characters were concerned, she seemed mostly normal. It seems therefore that she's suffered amnesia rather than actually being unconscious. Maybe her alter took over? Or maybe her visit to Samium didn't take as well as she hoped?

We also get some new rules, including coloured text. Red text (actually a darker red, but this is the only one I have on here) is used to describe Su finding a corpse that is absolutely definitely the corpse of that specific person, ruling out misidentifications, subsitutes etc. whoops, I misremembered that part! the only guarantee we get is that they're human remains and dead, but not whose human remains they are. (so this could be someone else who died and then, say, post-mortem transformed to look like neferatuen).

We also get to have new POVs, starting with an academic guy from an early chapter who seems to know more than he was letting on. These segments begin with a letter in purple text if we're supposed to treat them as reliable.

Considering Su blacked out for most of the relevant period, I'm not sure if we're supposed to really be able to solve any of the 'dunnit' questions at this point. What we know is that someone killed Neferuaten and stuffed her body in the bell. Why? Well we have a 'witch narrative' (the members of the Order will be killed one by one if they don't do ritual blah), and we also have reasons to suspect there could be conflict within the order. The thing is nobody has an alibi at this point - about the only people it's unlikely to be are Lilith (who was probably near Su) and Linos (who is established as unable to climb the stairs of the belltower, though then again these are all flying wizards here).

We also learn about a thing called the Allagiypnou Process, which reduces how much you have to sleep at the risk of potential personality changes. Every member of the Order except Linos has had it.

So not much to say just yet. I liked Neferuaten. But we already know it's a time loop story, so I'm sure she'll be back in a future loop.

The Playwright and the Director and final mysteries

The story is getting increasingly frequent interruptions from the Playwright and the Director, adding an increasingly metafictional dimension to this. This is not really surprising if you're an Umineko-head, but it does seem to be causing a certain amount of consternation in the comments.

I definitely suspect there is more to these characters than merely a cutesy way to inform us of the rules of the Fair Play mystery we're allegedly supposed to be solving. There are obvious questions like - who is the audience? What is the connection of the characters to the situation? If this is all being orchestrated, to what end?

Given the earlier declaration that entropy is sentient, I wonder if this is some kind of anthropomorphised representation of the 'will' of entropy? But that seems kinda cheap.

Anyway, we end with another set of reveals - Nindar, the academic back at the uni which they all left behind, is clearly in on whatever conspiracy is afoot here, and had a hand in bringing Fang and their mysterious object with the goal of changing the mission of the Order.

And also apparently the boys' group didn't even go up the space elevator.

So like what does that imply?? Are all the boys replaced with imposters? If the boys didn't go up the lift, but made their way to the Sanctuary by some other means, why do they all seem to remember going up the space elevator and following a similar route to the girls?

I honestly have no idea at this point. Feels like way too many unknowns to reason deductively about.

In conclusion

Sure are a lot of balls in the air right now. I'm fascinated to see where they might land.

Maybe let's make a list of like, known mysteries?

the big one: what skulduggery happened with Su's ascension that made it go so badly wrong? why did Ran react so badly to knowing that Su can't assimilate? what did Su's grandfather have to do with it?

who knocked out Yantho and ruined his roast?

whodunnit #1: who killed the cook, and why?

who hacked Kam's phone with the ultimatum, and why?

what happened between Su blacking out from seeing Beaky, and waking up in bed in the evening? (what did Samium do to her?)

whodunnit #2: who killed Neferatuen? why? when?

what crazy Great Work are the Order plotting? how's the Everblossom involved?

what's under the Sanctuary that's so big and important?

how did the Order come to the Sanctuary? there's clearly a story there.

who is Su's unnamed friend from the beach in the flashbacks?

what are the Playwright and the Director playing at? (are they secretly Gog-Agog?)

what does Balthazar know?

what's Fang hiding?

who's Beaky?

what does the terrorist attack have to do with the Conclave?

There's probably more I'm forgetting right now.

Not sure how many of these - if any! - we're supposed to be able to infer at this point in the narrative, but it's definitely a spicy brew!

I expect the bodies are going to hit the floor pretty quickly from this point, but who knows... we're still quite early on in this affair.

...phew, these writeups are a bit of a project. I've gotten everything down now I think, so I can finally let myself read the next chapter.

#the flower that bloomed nowhere #tftbn liveblog #fiction #sff

9 notes · View notes

quietly-by-myself · 1 year

Text

A Wicked Work of Art - Chapter 8

Masterlist

CW: medical whump, trans whumpee, test subject whumpee, experiment whumpee, fantasy racism, dehumanization, fantasy whump, doctor carewhumper, carewhumper, suicidal whumpee, suicide attempt aftermath, overdose mention, suicidal ideation mention, discussion of noncon (not whump), violent/abusive relationships, brief mention of familial rejection around being trans

===

Akakios found himself very tired after the doctor left. He didn’t know what to make of the doctor anymore. The medicine wasn’t going to work. Who was the doctor kidding? Nothing would ever change his life. He would never be allowed to attempt suicide again. He would never be free, seen as human again. So, what would medication change?

Those were the thoughts plaguing him as he sunk into the sleeping world.

There was Asimi, waiting for him, tears in their eyes.

Guilt overwhelmed Akakios. He couldn’t meet Asimi’s eyes. He expected them to berate him, to tell him how awful and selfish and abhorrent he was. Instead, Asimi just ran to him and hugged him tightly.

“I thought I was going to lose you.” Asimi’s voice was shaking, afraid. “I’m so glad that I didn’t.”

After a long period of silence, Akakios finally found his words. “Why, Asimi? Why did you possess me?”

Asimi pushed Akakios back a bit and put their hands on his shoulders. “I knew you couldn’t take that first experiment, Aka. I just, I panicked. I wanted to save you from that. I forget how much weaker your body is than mine, even with my influence.”

Akakios looked away. “He really hurt me.”

“I never expected him to.”

“Why not?”

Asimi went quiet. “When you’ve been around long enough, Aka, people rarely catch you off guard, but that doesn’t mean that it never happens.”

Akakios considered Asimi for a while. “I really do love you, Asimi. You know… the way that we do.”

Asimi nodded. “I didn’t know that one could love a friend without romance before you, my dear Aka.”

Akakios felt something in his heart that was part longing and part guilt. What was wrong with him? How could he have forgotten how much Asimi meant to him? How much he meant to them?

They shared a dream - a world where the two of them could live in peace together, as something more than friends, but not as lovers or romantic partners. It felt like a pipe dream. That world could never be. However, did that mean that he had to give up hope? Give up on himself?

It all felt so small, his reasons for dying, now that he thought about them with Asimi there. After all, times could be hard, but he knew that they could get better. After all, he’d lived all those years pretending to be a woman. He’d put on a good show for his mother and father, who, though he loved dearly, would never accept this new him. They would never accept the man who never wanted to wed.

And he’d survived Constantine. He’d actually survived. The worst, everything he’d feared - losing total control over his body - had happened and he’d fucking survived. He still didn’t have control, but he was still alive, wasn’t he? Even when he’d tried to take back control by ending his life.

Asimi smiled a little. “You’re so strong, my love. We can make it through this. The world we want will be ours, one way or another. But it will not be achieved through death. I am here forever. If you die, we will be apart forever.”

He’d hurt Asimi and they still had the strength to love him.

“I’m so sorry, Asimi.”

“You have nothing to be forgiven for, Aka, my love.”

Akakios found tears in his eyes and embraced Asimi again. Asimi held him, long in fast in their arms as Akakios cried all the tears he couldn’t in the world of the living.

—

Vasiliki didn’t sleep when he returned home. Instead, he found himself at the phone, carefully considering the phone call he was about to make.

Did he really want to do what he was about to do?

Vasiliki picked up the phone and dialed the all-too familiar phone number. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually wanted to call someone for something that wasn’t directly work-related.

Was this technically work related? Maybe. But, he felt like a ship in the middle of a hurricane and found himself longing, for the first time ever, to speak to someone.

It was early enough that his friend would be awake, but not early enough that he would be at work.

“Hello, this is Stergios speaking?”

“Stergios, it’s Vasiliki.”

“Vasiliki?” The surprise in Stergios’ voice was painfully obvious. “What are you doing calling me?”

“Do you have to go to work soon? It’s kind of a long story.”

“No, I don’t work. It’s a Saturday.” The concern came next. It almost made Vasiliki flinch. “What’s up?”

“Well, something came up at work.” Vasiliki took a seat next to the receiver and pressed his nose bridge. “I got a new patient and I decided to keep him.”

The silence on the other end of the receiver was painful. “I don’t want to hear about your work unless it’s important. You know I don’t like the way you guys operate at the Facility.”

“I know, I know. That’s why I’m coming to you for advice.” Vasiliki groaned. “He attempted suicide last night. I had to stay up with him doing an observation. Kid cried himself to sleep. I just, I can’t deal with this shit anymore.”

“It reminds you of your early days, right?” Suddenly, the voice that had been hostile was caring and soft.

“Yeah, twenty fucking patients and no time to properly care for any of them. I just started having them all restrained after I lost those three that week. And again, this only happened because he was left unrestrained. I’d forgotten to give him his testosterone shot, ‘cause he’s trans, and found him OD’ing on a bottle of pills I’d forgotten about.”

“Well, then, why call me? I’m always happy to listen to you, Vasil. You know that. But you never call.”

“I know I’m doing something wrong by doing what I’m doing. I’m ashamed that it’s taken me a hundred fucking years and four suicides, only one of which I was able to save, to make me realize it, but fuck. I feel like shit.”

The other line was silent for a long time. Vasiliki knew his admission could easily get him fired, but he didn’t care. Stergios wouldn’t tell anyone. He was sure of it. After all, they’d known each other since they were kids. If Stergios was going to betray him, it would’ve been a long time ago.

“What… what changed?”

“Fucking Constantine. And,” Vasiliki found tears in his eyes as he continued speaking. It was the first time that the words he was about to utter had ever left his lips. “You know that boyfriend I had ten years ago? The one named Giannis?”

“Yeah, I remember him. He was a real shit head.”

“Yeah,” Vasiliki broke down crying, unable to hold back the sobs. “He raped me. It was only once and he broke up with me the next day. But, fuck.”

Vasiliki found himself unable to talk.

“It’s okay, Vasil. I believe you. That must’ve been awful.”

“It was. After that, well, I’m naive as shit, but I could only work with Constantine because he didn’t do that to his subjects. But he did that to this kid and then he attempted suicide and I tried to be the doctor, the scientist, but I just can’t anymore.”

Again, Vasiliki found himself unable to talk over the tears. The guilt - both of his own experience and of Aka’s experiences - overwhelmed him.

“How about I come over, Vasil? I want to be there for you. I don’t want you to be alone going through this.”

Vasiliki nodded, but realized that Stergios couldn’t see that through the phone, so he whimpered that he would be happy to have Stergios over, but that all his food was rotten. Stergios simply said he would bring something fresh for them to eat and hung up.

And so, Vasiliki sat in wait for his friend to arrive, bawling his eyes out like he never had before. At least, at least, someone was coming to see him. Somehow, for the first time, that thought made him feel better.

===

Tags(always open): @i-can-even-burn-salad, @whumpsday, @pigeonwhumps, @oddsconvert, @pumpkin-spice-whump, @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi, @writereleaserepeat, @just-a-silly-little-whumper, @sparrowsage, @inscrutable-shadow, @whumplr-reader, @whumpycries, @demondamage, @whumpshaped

37 notes · View notes

with-love-from-hell · 2 years

Text

Vermillion Skies

{part Nineteen}

Fandom: Obey me!

Genre: hurt, comfort, angst, some fluff, slight NSFW

Pairing: Mc x Lucifer (pre-established relationship)

Written for F!MC

WC: ~5.4k

Music Accompaniment

TRIGGER WARNING FOR ALL PARTS: graphic depictions of sexual assault / rape, gore, and violence.

CW: catatonia, PTSD, panic attacks, depression, dissociation, anxiety, swearing, negative self-talk, self-blame, intrusive thoughts, passive suicidal ideation, references to past sexual violence, sexual harassment (e.g. up-skirting), threats of violence, mentions of genetalia, discussions of sex and morality, vague depiction of a wet dream/Masturbation, jealousy/romantic rivalry

>> Though I have a Masters Degree in Psychology, I am not your therapist. If you have experienced any form of sexual abuse, assault, or harassment and are in need of help, please utilize the RAINN sexual assault hotline or online chat service, or find additional help using the NSVRC website. <<

You can find any future parts by searching the tag #vermillion skies on my blog!

Read part 18 here

Read the Q&A post for parts 1-9 here!

Read the Q&A post for parts 10-15 here!

Breathe...just breathe...you can do this.

Your grip around Lucifer’s hand tightens as you approach the large double doors of the main hall to RAD. You had been doing well up until the threatening doors came into view, causing your stomach to churn with anxiety. Most of the demons you and the brothers had passed on the street barely even glanced in your direction- a drastic change for the last time you had been out of the house. While it felt nice to absorb the cool air of the Devildom morning- if you could even call it that with how dark it always was here- you knew that the pleasant feeling wouldn’t last long.

Lucifer paused as he felt your movements stiffen. He turned to you, giving you a gentle smile before squeezing your hand. “It’s okay. I’ll be right next to you through your first class.”

You nod, thankful that Lucifer had moved his schedule around so he could be with you in the mornings- sacrificing his lunch break to be with you this morning. You felt bad that he would be running himself ragged with responsibilities given that this was the first time he had spent a more than an hour at RAD in a month, but you were relieved that he wouldn’t be leaving your side just yet.

You sucked in a deep breath as Beel and Belphie pushed open the doors, holding them for you and the rest of the brothers to walk through. As you walked inside, you were greeted by Barbatos, who accompanied you, Mammon, and Lucifer to your curses and hexes class. Fortunately, you and the brothers had left a half-hour early for classes, so you would ensure you could enter the first class with no anxiety of being stared at among other demons who watched you enter.

Lucifer sat on one side of you, while Barbatos sat on the other. They had picked a table in the front of the room so you would be free from others turning around to stare at you. Mammon sat at the back of the room, ensuring to keep an eye on you from afar. He’d be dammed if some demon in the back of the class made some snide comment on his watch.

Lucifer squeezed your hand under the table as Barbatos helped guide your breathing. Their assistance allowed you to make it through the class with ease, though you barely absorbed the lesson on maledictions. As you got up to leave with Barbatos, you found yourself near tears at the thought of leaving Lucifer until the end of the day- the anxiety of being without him mounting slowly. Lucifer had given you the reassurance that you could come to his office during your study hours and spend that time with him in peace. With a deep breath, you reluctantly drop his hand and he watches you and Barbatos disappear out the door.

Your next class passes by painfully slow. Fortunately for you, it was Art- the class you enjoyed most. Simeon and Satan pulled up their easels next to yours while Barbatos sat behind you, carefully observing the other demons in the class. Simeon was eagerly chattering away with you as you painted the vase of corpse flowers in the center of the room.

You didn’t mind his talking- it actually grounded you to the room just as well as the breathing techniques Barbatos had taught you. Satan observed your artwork as your brush danced across the canvas. He was impressed by the mundane colors that you managed to make so vibrant on your canvas. You even gained accolade from the professor, who marveled at your artwork over all others in the class. Perhaps Levi’s choice in gifting you watercolor paints was wise, given your skill had greatly improved.

After art class, you had a gap in your schedule for a break. Satan accompanied you and Barbatos to the Library, picking a quiet corner to rest and collect yourself in before your Seductive Speechcraft class. Of your entire class schedule, you loathed this one the most. While you shared it with most of the brothers and it was your last class of the day, it was also the class where seducing othera was the primary focus, and often made you uncomfortable even before the assault. It was a terrible way to start your week, but you couldn’t help that this class fell on your Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule.

Barbatos excused himself briefly to get you something small to eat, given the next class was longer than the others. Mondays were typically your longest day after all, often running late into the evening as you spent the afternoon completing work for your role as ambassador and attending the weekly council meeting. It would be difficult to get through, but at the very least you could spend the last two hours relaxing on the couch in Lucifer’s school office, and that is what gave you the motivation to continue on through the class.

As you entered the room, a few of the lower demons glanced in your direction. You felt your face heat up with anxiety, glancing at your feet as you quickly took a spot at the table in the back corner of the room. Soon after you and Barbatos sat down- nibbling on the dried blackened echinacea petals he had grabbed for you- Simeon, Solomon, and Asmodeus entered the room. They made their way to you, taking seats around the other tables near you.

Simeon ensured to snag the spot next to you, much to Asmodeus’ protest- but he wanted to ensure he got to be your partner for the practice portion of class. Part of it was because he’d assumed you’d be more comfortable, but another, more honest part of him knew it was because it always made his heart melt when you tried to seduce him. It almost felt real- as if your relationship with Lucifer was non-existent, and he was the only object of your affection.

He watched you carefully throughout class, being mindful of the occasional winces when the professor asked for volunteers from the class to demonstrate a spell. For whatever reason, you were a favorite of the professor, and she often called on you to engage in demonstration. Perhaps part of the reason was that the demons then had an actual human to practice on, but Solomon was in the class as well, and he was rarely selected by the professor. Fortunately, the glares from Barbatos prevented her from looking your direction, and other demons were selected to perform her required tasks.

When it came time to practice the use of eye contact in seduction, Simeon found you struggled to meet his eyes. With a curl of his finger under your chin, he brought your face up to meet his alluring gaze. It was only now that he realized how far he’d leaned into your face, to the point where your noses were merely inches apart. You swallowed hard, feeling your heartrate increase as he gazed down at you. Something about the way the shine in his turquoise iris danced around with the flickering candle light in the room made your almost entranced, but there was a lingering emotion behind them that you couldn’t quite place. It made you anxious having him stare at you with such intent- something about it causing a pit to form in your stomach.

It wasn’t until a sudden comment from the professor of how well Simeon had performed the task at hand that you were snapped out of your daze, returning your stare to the floor. You were so enthralled that you hadn’t realized how close Simeon had gotten, and you scooted your chair away so that your legs brushed against Barbatos from under the table. He turned to you, not having noticed the events that had transpired, but was aware of your increase in anxiety. He patted your knee gently before resting his fingers against your wrist, helping you manage your breaths as he monitored your pulse.

The end of the class couldn’t come soon enough, and you practically sprinted out of the room. You knew this class would be the hardest, but it had been more difficult than you anticipated. All you wanted to do was collapse into Lucifer’s comforting embrace, the ache you felt without him growing to the point where it was nearly unbearable.

You had been so determined to see your lover that you separated from Barbatos without even realizing it- him losing you in the sea of lower demons that shuffled through the halls. Barbatos panicked, trying to see you amongst the crowd. It didn’t help that you were a particularly small human- your stature amongst the demons clear as they engulfed you in the crowd. He scolded himself internally, telling himself he should have grabbed your wrist before you ran out of the room, but his fear of hurting you was so strong that he avoided the action.

And now, there was an even bigger threat than a dislocated wrist. And it would be his fault for losing track of you if something were to happen.

Barbatos snaked his way through the crowd toward Lucifer’s office- knowing that’s where you had more than likely been headed. His eyes darted around as he scanned every face for yours, hoping against all odds that he would find you unscathed.

Fortunately for him, he managed to come across you before anything appeared to have happened. You were paused at the end of the hallway, mere steps away from Lucifer’s office, with a particularly large-statured demon standing before you. He leaned against the wall, a wide toothy grin displayed on his face as he talked to you. Your face looked pale; terror painted all over your expression. You clutched your books to your chest so tightly that he could see your knuckles turning white, even from the fair amount of distance had between the two of you.

Barbatos approached you, ensuring to keep an eye trained on the demon before you as he maneuvered through the crowd. Right as he was only mere steps behind you, he saw another demon bent over behind you. He was far enough away that he was out of sight as your attention remained trained on the demon in front of you. The second menaces' phone was in hand, and from behind Barbatos could see him attempting to take a picture of your privates from under your skirt. His blood heated with rage at the disgusting actions and his tail erupted from his back, gripping the wrist of the second demon. He yanked him away from you and brought him close to his face- to the point where their noses touched. He pulled the phone out of his hand, storing it in his breast pocket- all while maintaining firm eye contact with the depraved individual in his grasp.

“I suggest you think twice before acting on such impulses again.” Barbatos hissed, his voice taking an unnaturally dark tone. “Or Lucifer will have you regret your choices. That is- unless I don’t get to you first.”

As he spoke, Barbatos' pupils took on an almost reptilian shape- a warning to the demon in his ever-tightening grasp. Barbatos’ tail secreted a toxin that eased into the demons wrist as he squeezed it, the demon too terrified by Barbatos' threatening demeanor to notice. Once he was released from the butler’s grasp, a dark teal rash began spreading through his wrist and slowly up his arm. The demon gasped in horror, rushing away to find an antidote for the toxins rushing through his veins.

Barbatos’ attention then turned fully to you. You still stood shakily in front of the first demon, who clearly stood as the distractor while the second stole the disgusting pictures of you- and who knows what else. Barbatos locked eyes with the first demon, his eyelid twitching in annoyance. The first demon’s face sunk even more than it already had- as he was well aware that his plot had been thwarted.

Barbatos placed a hand on your shoulder, nearly causing you to jump out of your skin. You yelped loudly- the sound thankfully drowned out by the sea of chatter amongst the demons that surrounded you- otherwise Lucifer would have surely heard your distress and gone on a rampage.

“Pardon the interruption,” Barbatos smiled at the demon, but there was intense anger that hid behind it. “But I believe the young mistress will be late for her meeting with the Avatar of Pride. Shall we go, then?”

You blinked back your shock, regaining control of your breathing from the startling appearance of the butler. While he did scare the shit out of you, you were thankful for his presence and reminded yourself to not wander too far from him again. Being cornered by the demon who’s intentions you could not read was absolutely horrifying for you, and you felt the fear slowly fizzle out as you and Barbatos walked swiftly around the corner toward Lucifer’s office, leaving the demon behind in the hall.

“Mc.” Barbatos murmured into your ear as he guided you to the large black door. His voice was soft, but firm in it’s assertion. “Please do not stray from me like that again. It is far too dangerous.”

You swallowed hard, nodding at the sentiment. You felt embarrassment rise steadily within you as you understood how much of a risk your actions truly caused.

How stupid are you- really? Were you so oblivious that you think that something like this wouldn’t happen if you wandered off? Not only that, but you put Barbatos in jeopardy due to your ignorance. Tch. Maybe you’d have been better off being killed by that demon in the first place. It would save all of them so much trouble.

You swallowed back the sadness and guilt caused by the intrusive thoughts running through your mind. You managed to find peace in the fact that you were entering Lucifer’s office- a good distraction to be had from your thoughts.

“How was your day, Love?” Lucifer stood and greeted you with a soft kiss on the cheek as you and Barbatos approached his desk.

You smiled up at him, but there was a sadness behind the gesture. You gave a shrug in response to his question. “It was okay. I’m glad to have a break though- I feel tired.”

Lucifer nodded, taking your hand and leading you to his desk. You were surprised that he hadn’t brought you to the couch, but you were even more surprised when he swiftly guided you onto his lap. You blinked at him, trying to process his decision in having you so close to him while he worked. Surely you would be a distraction..?

He chuckled at your confusion and placed another kiss delicately on your forehead. “What? Can’t I express how much I missed your presence?”

You blush, turning your gaze to Barbatos, who smiled at the sight of you and Lucifer’s intimacy. Your cheeks burned hotter as you buried your head into the crook of his neck, but he didn’t miss the sweet smile that played on your lips.

It was a bold move he made to display affection like this, but he wanted to do more to show how much you still meant to him. Up until now, he had realized he had withheld so much affection from you unless you were distressed, and he wanted to ensure he was keeping up with your needs of affection even when you were doing okay.

He cradled you with one arm while he worked, drifting his pen across the documents in front of him with ease and making small talk with you and Barbatos while he worked. Other than the sounds of quiet murmuring and his pen scratching across paper, the room remained comfortably quiet. The occasional interruption from a lower demon who had an appointment to discuss their failing grades disrupted the silence, but overall it wasn’t a huge deal. You only ensured to keep your face turned away for fear of judgement from the demons who observed you being held so delicately by your lover

Because of Lucifer’s status in Devildom, he was exempt from taking classes unless the interest to do so struck him- which would on occasion when a subject passed through the council that would only be offered for a limited time. An occasional refresher course was sometimes nice too, but overall Lucifer took to looking over the students at RAD, providing guidance counseling for those struggling in their grades or for those who wanted to drop or add classes to their schedule. He was also responsible for incoming demons, ensuring they knew the rules and regulations of the Royal Academy of Diavolo. Because of his role, he often times had to spend a lot of time away from you to attend to the demons who needed a reminder of how important their status as a student in Diavolo’s academy was, so it was unusual for you to see his duties from behind the scenes.

You nuzzled into his collar, watching him effortlessly scribe as your mind drifted away. Your eyes felt heavy, fluttering open and closed as you tried to stay awake. Lucifer felt your body begin to fall limp, only to be replaced with tension as you forced the sleep away. He smiled, looking down at the adorable sleepy look that decorated your face as you yawned. Lucifer picked you up, gliding over to the couch across from the hearth, in which a roaring fire had been lit long before. Lucifer removed a cashmere throw blanket from a basket near the sofa, along with a plush end pillow after setting your down on the cracking leather. He tucked you in firmly before pressing a soft kiss to your lips. Unconsciousness fell upon you soon after, and you snuggled into the lingering scent of his cologne that caressed your senses so delicately as you slept.

--------------------------------------

It was a few hours later when Lucifer gently shook you awake out of your peaceful slumber- the first you’ve had in over a week. He mentioned something vaguely about the council meeting, indicating that he wanted to leave you here to rest, but didn’t want to leave without saying something first. You panic, remembering how on the night of your assault, you had been left alone at the HOL. You clasp his forearms, the sleepy fog that surrounded your mind prevented you from getting words out, but he could tell you were distressed at the notion.

“Mc, it’s alright.” he cooed to you, kneeling down so he was eye-level. “If you want to accompany me, you may. I just wanted to give you the option to rest. You also wouldn’t be alone- Barbatos and Simeon had offered to stay here with you until the end of the meeting.”

You glanced over at Barbatos, who was seated in the arm chair across from you reading a book. He looked up, giving you a gentle smile before dropping his gaze back down to the page he was reading. Simeon was seated at the small table in the center of Lucifer’s office, typing vigorously away on the keyboard to his laptop. You sucked in your bottom lip, chewing the skin as you thought about what you would rather do. The council meeting would surely be a distraction, but you were still so exhausted and you weren’t sure if you’d be able to offer much with your presence. The day had been absolutely draining, and while you wanted to put your best foot forward in getting back to a sense of normalcy, Lucifer had reminded you that the accommodations offered existed to serve a purpose, and he wanted you to utilize them to prevent you from burning yourself out.

Lucifer brushed a stray hair away from your eyes, waiting patiently for your reply. After a brief moment, you expressed your preference to rest some more near the cozy hearth. He nodded, cupping your jaw in his hand and giving you a long, but delicate kiss.

Simeon glanced over at the two of you from the corner of his eye, feeling envy rise up within him at the sight of your lips locked together. His keystrokes became aggressive as he tried to ignore the feeling within his chest. He hated that Lucifer had begun being more public in his displays in affection toward you, because now there were more opportunities for him to flaunt around the fact that you were his. Perhaps Lucifer didn’t intend for that to be the message he was conveying, but to Simeon, that’s all he was able to interpret.

Lucifer nodded to Simeon and Barbatos before exiting the room, stealing one last glance at you before making his way to the Student Council chambers. He gate had a pep in it that was never before observed by anyone else. Usually, he would try to present such a calloused demeanor, even going so far as to be cold toward you in the halls of RAD. But since your assault, he wanted everyone to know who his heart belonged to- especially given that there was a clear warning behind the softness of his affection toward you. That warning indicated that he would destroy anyone who dared come in between the two of you- that he would rip them to shreds if they even so much as had a passing thought of harming you.

Before, he saw you as his biggest weakness, and figured that you would be targeted by others should he treat you the way typical couples acted in public. But now he saw you as his strength- the individual who ignited so much passion within him for the things he enjoyed, and saw him for more than his accomplishments. You saw past his abilities and nurtured his flaws- choosing to love him despite them. You forgave his mistakes, and he took a lesson in humility and mercy from you that he had never before seen. Truly, you had given him abilities he had never before had- not even in his days in the Celestial realm. The further strengthening bond between him and his brothers was proof as well. He wanted to show the other demons that, despite the softness he could embody, he was no stranger to ruthlessness. You gave him the ability to be vulnerable- which came with its problems, but overall made his life more meaningful.

Lucifer sat through the student council meeting drifting in and out thought. He made note of the progress being made on the ball to be held at the castle on Friday, discussing each responsibility held by the brothers. Asmo and Levi would be in charge of dressing you for the affair; Belphie, Solomon, and Mammon would be responsible for Decorations; Satan would be in charge of specific invitations for some of the lower demons; and Beel, Luke, and Barbatos were in charge of catering the event. Lucifer was tasked to ensuring the ball remained a surprise until Friday, and would be supervising the tasks at hand along side Simeon. Otherwise, Lucifer mostly stared off into space, fantasizing about dancing with you at the event as the others talked.

“Ooo! What if we made the ball themed?!” Asmodeus squealed, overjoyed with the thought of a theme party. “Maybe a costume party? Or- OH! Or maybe a masquerade ball?”

“A masquerade would be interesting- but that would pose a threat to safety.” Satan shrugged, returning his focus to doodling a cat on the corner of his note pad.

“How so?” Belphie queried. “I think it would be an okay idea...”

“It would be difficult for us to keep track of who does and does not belong if faces are covered.” Diavolo nodded. “That’s a good observation Satan.”

“Does there hav‘ta be a theme?” Mammon groaned. “That’s a lot of work for us to decorate in just the right way.”

“I hope you weren’t just planning on throwing colors together all slapdash.” Asmo narrowed his eyes at the 2nd oldest, his gaze accusatory.

“Yeah, and Belphie would probably just leave all the color coordinating to him.” Leviathan snickered, poking fun at the youngest for his tendency to half-ass a lot of things.

“Hey!” Belphie snorted in annoyance. “I wouldn’t flake out on a party for Mc.”

“Ugh- can you all please stop arguing.” Satan pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Well,” Diavolo mused, entertained by the fact that the brothers were seemingly being more playful again. “It it’s a theme we want, why don’t we focus on something related to her recovery- something like...”

Beel perked up, an idea springing to his head. He had remained mostly quiet during the meeting, not thinking he would have much to contribute to planning, but the idea was too much for him to sit by on. He eagerly interrupted Diavolo, excited to pose his idea to the prince. “A Phoenix?”

The room went quiet, all eyes widened and landed on Beelzebub. Even Lucifer’s attention was perked by the suggestion, surprised by the idea coming from Beel’s head. He usually wasn’t one for metaphor- that was much more characteristic of Satan.

“A party themed with phoenixes...” Diavolo rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “...Representative of her rising from the ashes after intense pain, and her radiant, fiery beauty...Frankly, I think that’s a splendid idea.”

“That’s genius Beel!” Asmo shrieked. “Oooh! I already have so many ideas! I will get to designing her dress and makeup immediately!”

Lucifer felt his heartbeat quicken as the image of you beautifully wrapped in a glowing, feathery dress passed through his head. Flames licked your overly-exposed skin as you danced in the middle of the empty ballroom, the calculating movements of your body sending shivers down his spine. He shook the fantasy away, tucking it in the recesswa of his mind for later.

He nodded to the others, indicating he was also on board with the idea. The other brothers’ mood picked up as they began exploring ideas for themed decorations and food for the event, finding themselves enthralled by the idea of a phoenix-related theme for the party.

-------------------------------------------------------

“Mc, can I ask you something?” Simeon wandered over to where you lay watching the fire. He sat on the floor in front of you, fiddling with the golden charms on his shall.

“Hmm?” you murmur, glancing at him briefly before turning your gaze back to the fire.

Before speaking, Simeon’s eyes darted over to Barbatos. He was unconscious, book resting open on his lap. He must have used the opportunity to rest given the fact that Diavolo had been running him ragged with responsibility to ensure your safe return to RAD. Simeon carefully observed the gentle rise and fall of his chest to confirm he was peacefully dozing before turning back to you.

“I was wondering...” he started, unsure of how to broach the subject innocently. “How have things been with you and Lucifer lately?”

You were slightly taken aback by the question. No one had even bothered asking you much about how you were doing outside of your physical health or when you were experiencing a crisis. You smiled warmly at him, appreciating the small talk that you missed having among the brothers. It was beginning to get to you abit- knowing that all they had been thinking about was your assault.

“It’s been great.” You mused, feeling your face redden as you reflected on how tender Lucifer was toward you. “Wonderful, really.”

Simeon faked a smile, nodding along to try to hide his disappointment. “I heard you moved in together? Th-that’s a big step, huh?”

You shrug, your cheeks burning more as you thought about it. “Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I don’t think it would have been good for me to go back to my old room- especially after what had happened.”

Simeon nodded. “Do you miss it? Your old room, I mean?”

You ponder the question for a moment, chewing on the inside of your cheek. “Sometimes...I guess? It’s been quite an adjustment sharing a bed with someone every single night.”

Simeone snickered at the comment, trying and failinf to stifle a laugh. “You make it sound like sleeping next to Lucifer is a punishment.”

Your eyes widen and you shake your head. “No! no...that’s not what I meant!” The guilt you felt at even insinuating there was anything bad about your new living arrangement creeped up within you.

Did you really have to make it sound so bad? After all he's done for you?

So ungrateful.

Simeon noticed your clearly dampened mood and began regretting the petty comment. He brushed a hair away from your face, attempting to comfort you. “Hey- It’s okay. I was just kidding.”

You sigh, trying to regain control of your breathing. “It’s just hard sometimes. Like- I love sleeping next to him. He’s so affectionate and kind, and he always comforts me after a nightmare...”

“...But?” Simeon raised an eyebrow.

“But...It can be hard sleeping next to a demon with...you know...” You swallow hard, trying to find the way to describe the discomfort you had felt on occasion with Lucifer’s phallus pressing against you while you slept. “...those parts.”

Simeon nodded, finding it mildly humorous that you felt embarrassed to say the word ‘penis’ in front of him. He could almost laugh at the idea if he didn’t feel so envious of the fact that Lucifer was able to be close enough to you that you would touch in such a way. “That’s understandable. I mean, I can’t blame you for straying away from that type of activity after what you’ve gone through.”

You gulp and nod in response, but say nothing. You thought about the desire you experienced a few nights prior when Lucifer held you late into the night, long past the time where sleep took over him but you lay awake, terrified to let your eyes close for fear of another nightmare.

Lucifer had groaned into your ear in his sleep, the sound of your name rolling sweetly off his tongue. You turned your head to meet his blissfully unconscious face, lips slightly parted as ragged pants passed through them. You found yourself entranced by his beauty in the moment, feeling a slight twinge of desire course through your loins that was only heightened as you felt his member stiffen against your outer thigh. If it weren’t for the anxiety, you would have perhaps been more turned on by the moment- but you instead let it pass...finding an odd sense of comfort and normalcy in Lucifer’s nocturnal emissions.

Of course, this was something you kept inside. You wouldn’t dare even share the fact that you were aware of the moment with Lucifer himself- let alone others. Besides that fact, you felt shame for the feelings of arousal sparked by his involuntary actions during sleep. You felt it had to be much too soon since your assault to think of anything related to sexual interaction, so the idea of having any desire scared you. Perhaps it was something you would come to terms with in the coming days.

Simeon observed your silence anxiously at his sentiment. He found himself curious- too much for his own good. Had Lucifer tried anything with you? He pretended to have so much impulse control, but Simeon could see the hunger in his eyes when he stared at you before the assault. Now, he had softened since then- but the fact he would freely display affection to you once more was a sign to Simeon that he had begun to fall back into his own normalcy and he was worried for your wellbeing. After all, he was still a demon. He had the same primal urges of the individual who assaulted you- he was sure of it. Or maybe...that’s just what he told himself to justify the longing he felt to be with you in such a lewd manner, telling himself that an Angel would be the only being able to treat you properly.

Simeon was an angel, after all- and angels weren’t resistant to such desires- though there was firm rules in place of sex in the celestial realm. For an angel to delve into a sexual encounter, the primary focus needed to be on love for the individual, and was intended to be an extremely controlled action. Falling into the sin of lust was strictly forbidden, and it was especially sinister to engage in sexual relationships with any creature that was not angelic...But Simeon would often push away the last stipulation of the rules regarding sex, for fear that his temptations to deflower you would have him cast out.

You were different though...Somewhere between an angel and a human. At least in his eyes, that’s how he saw you. He needed some justification for the fantasies he was indulging in more and more frequently when he found himself alone in the haunting darkness of his room. The image of your body fitting so perfectly against him spurred him on in those moments, desperate to feel any connection toward you that made him feel special.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Part 20

Tags for those who requested: @kairikazu05 @siniy606 @yukariutena @raeraekubs @hobin-gnoblin @shawnmendeslmfao @hatsunemiku2025 @katesatterfield @sg-artem @theeonlyroman @wonder-alien @ryuksexlover @svnflowery @saharahsbliss @uzumakioden @infiinnityverse @reshi-galaxy

166 notes · View notes

frame-to-frame · 3 years

Text

Breaking Down Griffith’s Coping Mechanisms: Repression v. Self Harm

CW: extended discussion of self harm and suicidal ideation, images of torture, mentions of CSA

For anyone interested, here is my very long breakdown of how I read Griffith’s state of mind and coping mechanisms (1. repression and 2. self harm) working throughout the Golden Age of Berserk. I think this reading provides an explanation as to why Griffith acts the way he does in some of his more obtuse and “irrational” scenes (the river, Charlotte), and how these actions eventually lead him to becoming Femto at the end of this arc.

Miura may not have planned all this out explicitly, but I think he has a good understanding of the psychological reality of why people repress and why they self harm, and the story proceeds accordingly.

This essay is basically a psychological deep-dive and a reworked version of a very long conversation I had with @bthump last year, it’s taken me a while to get back to this because life n stuff.

The content of this analysis is basically going through the GA scenes where Griffith acts in a self-destructive way and explaining how and why this happens and how it informs his actions in the story more generally.

If you don’t like or understand Griffith, I would invite you to give this analysis a shot anyway, because a lot of Griffith’s story takes place in the subtext of the Golden Age, and it takes a liberal helping of interpretation to figure out what’s going on. This of course is just one reading of Griffith’s character, but as I hope to show, there remains a consistent logic behind his actions that governs his impulses to act in the way he does throughout the story.

Okay, enough preamble, let’s jump in.

On Griffith’s Guilt

So first off, we have to ask why Griffith acts in these self-destructive ways in the first place. Basically, what are his coping mechanisms are responding to – why are they necessary at all?

I think it’s pretty clear that the heart of Griffith’s pain, coping mechanisms, and self-destructiveness is his guilt. More specifically, this guilt comes from the belief that he is cruel and evil because he’s willing to continue to pile up bodies and walk that corpse-laden path to the dream, to put others in harm’s way for his own sake, to devour others’ dreams for the sake of his own.

We see this in the flashback with the doll-knight boy, when his guard slips in front of Casca:

Casca specifically flags for us that this is a significant and unusually revealing moment for Griffith, where he shows a sliver of what’s underlying his implacable façade as a mercenary leader.

Another moment where we see Griffith’s guilt directly expressed is in “Tombstone of Flame: Chapter 2.” This scene shows us more explicitly that his guilt is bound up in his pursuit of the dream and the cruelty it takes to make that dream a reality:

From this scene, we can understand that to Griffith, his “cruelty” is specifically associated with walking the path to the dream, and alongside this, his willingness to put others in danger while he himself remains out of reach of harm’s way. These are both shown to us as things he hates himself for, given that he self harms directly after these scenes (with Gennon and with the second set of scratches – and if you need evidence that the latter happens, bthump has broken this down here).

This “cruelty” that lies at the heart of his guilt is why the guilt trip the Godhand take him on during the Eclipse cuts so deep, because throughout that sequence, the Godhand emphasize exactly that aspect, his cruelty, and no other part of him (such as his remorse, his intentions to create a more equal world, etc.).

On Griffith’s Repression and Resentment of his Dream

Alright, so we know why Griffith feels guilty. The next question is how Griffith responds to this – I’m suggesting here that it’s through a dual combination of repression and self harm. So, why does Griffith repress and why does he self harm?

Generally speaking, he represses to make himself feel better. This is basically the act of redirecting his feelings – telling himself that the guilt/pain he experiences over pursuing the dream doesn’t matter because all of these acts of cruelty are in fact justifiable, because they agreed to it, because he thought about this logically, because fate said it was OK, because he feels nothing, because, because… It’s basically every time he puts aside his feelings in pursuit of the dream.

Griffith’s repression involves rationalizing away his feelings in order to retreat to a space of emotional safety as an escape from his self hatred and the guilt he feels over his willingness to pursue the dream. The repression exists to smother the negativity he feels about the dream (and what it takes to get there) however it possibly can. And it is in this way that Griffith’s ability to attain his dream becomes closely tied to his ability to repress his guilt over wanting to and trying to obtain it. The repression and the dream basically go hand and hand.

However, it’s important to acknowledge that Griffith’s repression also walks a delicate line, because it attempts to excuse the corpses for the sake of the shining end goal as the ultimate justification for all the bodies, effectively justifying death with more death in a vicious circle, where the guilt continues to grow larger and larger into a mountain of bodies that is eventually visualized for Griffith directly in the guilt trip.

To make a bit of a subtle distinction here, it's not exactly that Griffith’s ability to repress his guilt over all of this becomes necessarily weaker the more the bodies pile up around him, because the increased body toll simply demands the need for greater and greater justification. In other words, it asks that he make a huge sacrifice for a huge gain – the eclipse for a utopia, basically.

However, we see that how this plays out in practice is that Griffith’s repression works against itself if not in the short run, in the long run because it ends up feeding this vicious circle. His repression feeds and intensifies his self loathing because it effectively enables more death, which in turn necessitates the greater need for his coping mechanisms and with it a stronger and stronger ability to repress those negative feelings. So if his ability to repress ever falters, what’s waiting in the wings is an increasingly difficult-to-justify mountain of death, guilt, and self hatred.

And not only that, if we dig a bit deeper, his ability to repress also feeds his self loathing directly, even as its entire goal exists to suppress it – because if he hates himself for his “cruel” willingness to walk the corpse-laden path to the dream, and the primary way he’s able to do this is because of his repression, then his ability to repress, to put on the mask for the sake of continuing the dream, would also be something he (unconsciously) hates about himself.

And in fact I think we see some of this resentment over his ability to repress his guilt finally acknowledged in the Godhand’s guilt trip:

Read: “That’s right, I knew what this was doing, what I was excusing, what I was encouraging, and I found a way to do it anyway.”

If Griffith’s repression is what enables his cruelty, when his ability to repress falters and he’s left only with his self loathing (as we see in in the guilt trip sequence, or even to a lesser degree with Casca in the river sequence), he is thus also hit with the resentment and self hatred not just over his willingness to repress his guilt but over the dream also, because this is what all this evil has been done in the name of: this is the ultimate cause. “It’s a blood-smeared dream after all.”

Of course we can see that Griffith is still able to functionally rely on the dream as a coping mechanism all the while implicitly resenting it throughout the Golden Age, but only insofar as he’s successfully able to repress the negatives that threaten to undermine its ability to function. After all, that’s why he needs to repress his guilt over the dream in the first place, because he cannot justify pursuing the dream if he confronts that guilt directly – it’s basically always threatening to overwhelm him.

And so, as soon as the mask of repression begins to slip, this underlying resentment makes it progressively harder to put on the mask and convince himself that the dream is worth all this death and cruelty. As we see in the river scene, once overcome by negative feelings about the dream – that the dream may in fact be able to excuse nothing, it may be ultimately nothing other than a monument to his own cruelty – the repression slips and he reverts to self harm, and he can only snap the mask back in place when he realizes that other people still need him to keep up that façade.

Griffith’s repression is essentially, at its heart, a precarious coping mechanism – it is intrinsically set up to undermine itself. The repression feeds and strengthens Griffith’s feelings of self loathing and his need to turn to self harm as a backup coping mechanism, which is effectively threatening to burst through the surface at any moment.

As we’ll see in the next section, his self harm in turn functions to invalidate his belief in the positive aspects of the dream (basically that it can still redeem him or his actions), and with it his ability to repress his own negative feelings.

This is essentially why I read the climax of Griffith’s Golden Age arc being the collapse of his coping mechanisms and his belief in the dream – because it hangs on his ability to successfully repress the negative feelings he has about the dream, and it hangs on two coping mechanisms that work at cross purposes from one another.

On Griffith’s Self Harm

Okay, so we’ve been over why Griffith feels guilt and how his repression works, but how does his self harm function in the story? First, let’s look at what it does for him emotionally.

There are a couple reasons people generally self harm – one of the main ones is that it can serve as a distraction from our problems and emotions, allowing people to focus on the pain in the moment to the exclusion of everything else. This kind of self harm would function like repression in Griffith’s case, because it would bury the guilt with a sort of distraction, by smothering it with a different kind of pain.

Now I don’t think that’s how Griffith’s self harm works, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it’s because none of the instances of self harm we see textually in Berserk actually function to help him forget or diminish his guilt or self loathing over pursuing the dream, and instead are oriented around the opposite, leading him to focus on it instead.

In the river when he’s scratching himself, he’s almost doing it subconsciously, like he’s not even paying attention to what he’s doing, and he’s instead thinking about what he’s talking about: the dream, specifically the negative aspects of the dream:

Throughout this scene, he’s not focused on his own self-inflicted suffering as a distraction, he’s focused on his own guilt from pursuing the dream. His suffering is positioned here as a direct consequence of his guilt.

Similarly, when he’s fucking Charlotte he’s thinking about Guts leaving and rejecting him, not getting lost in what he’s doing with her.

Neither of these two instances of Griffith’s self harm are functioning as distractions from his pain, they’re about intensifying it. So, why would he want to intensify his pain?

It’s because the self harm is Griffith’s backup coping response – it’s what seeps out when the repression isn’t strong enough to bury the guilt. It’s what happens when he’s hit with the full intensity of the self loathing, guilt, resentment, etc. that his repression usually protects him from. Given that he’s essentially being overwhelmed by his self hatred, it makes sense that he would want to feel worse as a result, because this is him accepting and becoming all-consumed with the idea that he is evil and cruel, and he thus “deserves” to suffer.

It is in this way that the self harm serves as a punishment in Griffith’s eyes: “dirtying” himself is essentially meting out justice, effectively giving him what he “deserves” for his own cruelty. In his eyes, this is him reaping what he’s sown.

Basically, the second reason why I think the self harm doesn’t function as a distraction is that it seems to be more centred around penance through his own suffering. The strongest evidence for this again comes from the river scene:

“[F]or hundreds, thousands of lives to hang in the balance and myself alone to not be unclean…”

This part of his monologue clearly sets up his own suffering (“dirtying” himself) as both punishment and atonement for his guilt over putting other people’s lives in danger.

Digging into this a bit deeper, Griffith is still essentially trying to prop up the dream here through his self harm, by trying to position his own suffering as constructive to his end goal. If the guilt threatens to tell him that none of this is worth it, the self harm in this instance is Griffith telling himself that it can be if he is just punished enough for it. (“What I want…won’t enter my grasp so easily as that.”)

This monologue shows us that in Griffith’s mind, his own suffering may be directly given up in response to the suffering of others. It’s what’s being offered in “exchange” – basically, if he becomes unclean enough (read: suffers enough) it’ll make all those hundreds and thousands of lives that hang in the balance “okay” (and you can see how this is some shaky and desperate logic).

In construing his self harm as a sort of atonement for the lives he’s put on the line for his dream, he is trying to absolve himself through his own suffering. This moment in the river essentially shows us Griffith’s thought process as he is in the process of self harming: “If I suffer and atone for this, then it will all be okay in the end, I can still attain my dream because I will have paid my dues.”

However, while Griffith tries to make this impulse to self harm constructive, as we’ll get into in the following section, we can see that this is still always fundamentally destructive to his goals because it always makes him feel worse about himself and his own actions, and that impulse to feel worse can easily spiral out of control when faced with a growing mountain of bodies and a shrinking sense that he can offer up anything in penance or justification for it.

This choice of the word “unclean” here basically serves as a signpost to explain why Griffith takes every single later action he associates with “dirtying” himself throughout the story. This idea of “dirtying” himself is obviously extremely loaded – these acts which make sure he’s not “unclean” are communicated as acts of self-imposed suffering that take place as a sort of punishment after he acts “cruelly” (this is not him putting himself in harm’s way during battle, he does that anyway), and they’re acts that he himself explicitly views as loathsome and disgusting.

It’s clear that he views having sex with a child predator in similar terms to scratching himself – to Griffith, “dirtying” himself is essentially his self-imposed punishment, and he’s basically trying to construe that punishment as productive by positioning his suffering as in some way equivalent to the suffering of others (basically, “if I suffer too then that’ll make their suffering okay”).

This is also why, as we’ll get into in a minute, if he doesn’t view his suffering as “worth” anything, it becomes impossible to view his suffering as equivalent to the suffering of others. And that’s also why the more the suffering and the bodies pile up around him, the more difficult it is to rationalize his suffering as equivalent to all of this pain and horror.

This is basically the process of how Griffith rationalizes his self harm, this is how he construes it as a productive enterprise instead of a self-destructive one – this is the logic that links his self harm with achieving his goal.

And clearly it’s logic that’s resting on some supremely precarious ground.

Repression v. Self Harm

In order to see how my readings of Griffith’s self harm v. his repression play out, let’s revisit a few key scenes in greater detail before we get into discussing the wider implications of this in terms of Griffith’s story and the sacrifice as the culmination of all of this.

Let’s start with Griffith’s interchange with Guts in Tombstone of Flame:

This conversation basically proceeds as follows: do you think I’m cruel? -> yeah, but you believe the cruelty is necessary, don’t you? -> yes, you’re right, all of this is cruel, and I am too, so I deserve to be punished for it -> self harm with the second set of scratches.

That smile – that same smile as with the doll-knight boy, and indeed the same as the sacrifice – is Griffith being overwhelmed by self loathing. This is not repression. This is not “You’re wrong, I’m not cruel/it doesn’t matter because [denial/rationalization/repression/justification],” it’s “You’re right.” This is me. I’m cruel, a monster, and therefore I deserve to suffer.

And indeed, all three examples of that same smile (the river, Tombstone of Flame, and the sacrifice) lead to acts of self harm. In this case, this isn’t an example of him trying to justify or bury the guilt and pain and horror or build up his defences like the repression would, it’s him justifying an act of self-destruction to tear himself down, because he thinks he deserves it.

To really dig into this distinction, let’s turn to another example of how Griffith’s self harm works in contrast to the repression, and return to the scene where Griffith scratches himself in the river.

First of all, he’s scratching himself here because he feels guilty over putting people in harm’s way for the sake of his dream (a feeling which is specifically kicked off by doll-knight boy but I think it’s made pretty obvious that this is just over people in general), while denying this guilt out loud and spewing his BS rationalizations to Casca.

Both the self harm and the repression are working in response to the same guilt here. But why doesn’t he stop with the rationalization? Why is it narratively or psychologically necessary that he also self harms at all here?

It’s because the denial (i.e., repression) isn’t strong enough to smother the guilt – and yeah, it’s because his rationalization is flimsy as fuck – basically it boils down to “I don’t feel responsible because I am a being of pure logic.” Which: lol

Again, the rationalization exists here to suppress Griffith’s negative feelings, the guilt, self-loathing, and monstrousness – this is him telling himself the guilt doesn’t matter, basically trying to push it away so he doesn’t have to emotionally confront it, because “I thought about it logically […] I don’t feel at all responsible…”

But we see that the rationalization isn’t strong enough, and the self harm is what seeps out when the rationalization can’t bury his self loathing. When the self harm takes over directly after this, the tone of this exchange changes and specifically swings toward the negative aspects of the dream: as he gets deeper into scratching himself, he becomes more and more dream-negative, i.e., focused on how his dream is built on corpses:

We’re being visually told that his answer to this, his way to make sure he’s not unclean, is to not only have sex with a child predator, but also pay that debt through his blood and suffering. The self harm is justifying his self loathing and guilt in a different way than the rationalization is, not telling himself that “the death is okay because [repression],” but instead “the death not OK – I hate myself and I need to atone for this, which will hopefully make it OK in the end.”

And importantly, as mentioned earlier, as soon as Griffith gets a stronger angle in this exchange – protecting Casca instead of protecting himself – his repression snaps back in full force and he reins in the self harm immediately.

I see this moment as especially significant to understanding how Griffith’s self harm works, because it shows us that the self harm cannot uphold itself as a coping mechanism, it’s basically destined to collapse on itself.

This is because in order to believe you can atone for something through your actions, you have to believe that your actions, your own suffering, has worth. And since the self harm is premised on tearing himself down, as he gets deeper in the hole of self harm, it becomes more and more difficult to believe that his penance is worth a damn. It’s just as much of a balancing act as the repression is, except that it specifically hinges on Griffith’s sense of self worth… so it’s pretty much destined to spiral out of control.

To reiterate, why is the self harm still a defence mechanism if it’s designed to make Griffith feel worse and emphasize the negative aspects of the dream over the shining end goal?

The river scene shows us how Griffith’s repression works in relation to his self harm – when the repression falters, the self loathing that has him focusing on the road of corpses gets him dangerously close to thinking that the dream isn’t worth it, and obviously he can’t live with that because then he’s left with nothing. The self harm (at least in the case of the scratching and Gennon) functions as the last line of defense against that sneaking suspicion that the castle cannot in fact redeem all of this death – because it asserts that maybe the dream can still be worth it if he suffers and atones for his actions. Again, the evidence for this is in the river scene:

“But… for hundreds, thousands of lives to hang in the balance and myself alone to not be unclean… What I want…won’t enter my grasp so easily as that.”

That last part indicates that he essentially still wants to want the dream here, and the self harm is basically what’s allowing him to do so, to continue on the path to his dream through his suffering as penance.

Yet even as this recuperative logic works to some degree in the river scene, this belief is still founded on the (shaky) assumption that his own suffering is worth anything in exchange for the suffering of others. That’s why, to me, it seems apparent that Griffith’s self worth plays such an important part in the breakdown of his coping mechanisms, and why it makes sense that at a certain point he reaches such a low that the self harm no longer becomes penitent, it becomes only punishment. This is the point where self harm becomes self destruction, and this is exactly what happens with Charlotte.

On Griffith’s Self Harm as Self Destruction

We know that Griffith having sex with Charlotte and his subsequent taunting of her father work differently than with the scratching and Gennon, because unlike these two cases, these instances of self harm involve him throwing away the dream too (or at the very least in the former case, putting the dream directly into jeopardy) – casting it into the fire along with all the other “frightening and sad things.” Like with his later suicide attempt and the sacrifice, this isn’t an example of Griffith still wanting to walk the path of the dream, this is him reaching the point where the dream no longer seems worth it, and we know this because he takes steps to actively throw it away (though I do think this understanding is still operating largely instinctually/unconsciously until the soup-behelit, as I outlined in my previous meta).

Throughout the torture sequence, as he goads the King into viciously beating him, we see that Griffith verbally associates his own failure (by implication – he is clearly referring to himself as well as the King throughout this sequence) with his worthlessness.

At this point, Griffith is masochistically relishing in the fact that he basically cannot offer anything to anyone anymore – his penance is no longer worth anything to anyone, and all that remains is the suffering he thinks he deserves.

This is the first time we see Griffith’s self harm not being mobilized in a remotely constructive way. Getting beaten doesn’t have anything to do with attaining the dream, this is a naked display of the belief that Griffith thinks he deserves to suffer for his actions without the veneer of his suffering functioning as penance. This is now simply his punishment, for daring to try to pursue the dream in the first place.

This exchange effectively reveals the naked truth to us – that Griffith’s self harm reflects his desire to suffer for what he’s done to others. Even though he may have pretended in the past that this desire to suffer for his sins can still in some way still be constructive to his goals, this moment shows us that ultimately it’s not. Here we’re seeing directly that when Griffith’s self worth is low (i.e., when he feels like shit), all he wants to do is suffer more, and that’s basically the rub.

And yeah, of course that’s how it works, because this is exactly how we see his self harm working throughout the story. Whenever he feels guilty/cruel/dirty, we watch him self harm to feel worse: the doll-knight boy and Gennon, Gennon and the scratching, “am I cruel” and the scratching, being rejected by Guts and self destructing, all culminating in the low point of the torture and “This is worthless.”

This scene shows us that Griffith’s self worth is intrinsically tied to his belief that he deserves to suffer, and this is set up as a vicious circle – the worse he feels, the worse he wants to make himself feel, and so on.

To back up a bit to the preceding scene with Charlotte, this is basically the gateway scene between Griffith as a functional human and Griffith as a self-destructing catastrophe.

Why he comes to Charlotte in this moment is open for debate – perhaps he’s simply trying to repress his pain over Guts’ leaving by attempting to seize the dream by seducing the princess. Or perhaps he secretly wants to get caught doing something risky that will fundamentally jeopardize the dream in order to punish himself for being unworthy of Guts’ love. Or perhaps it’s both at the same time.

Let’s quickly break down how this scene works in terms of Griffith’s state of mind. First we see him still trying to play the gentlemen, still repressing and putting on a show of the perfect prince for Charlotte. Soon after though, the mask drops and he basically reveals a hardened statue beneath. He’s ultimately too hurt in this moment to keep the cheeky and/or charming mask up – he looks like he feels cold and empty, and he’s still trying not to think about what’s just happened with Guts.

This is basically an exact midpoint between his repression and his self harm – he’s trying to smother the pain by not thinking about it (repression at its simplest), but at the same time what he’s choosing to do with Charlotte actually intensifies his pain, because it leads him to think about Guts anyway (self harm).

Again, Griffith’s repression exists to make himself feel better, to reassert the importance and value of the dream, and his actions don’t actually accomplish this in the slightest. It doesn’t make him feel better, because it’s functionally designed to make himself feel worse.

And yeah, we see that afterwards he clearly feels 1000% worse, not better.

Griffith’s self harm moves into the territory of self destruction here because he isn’t actually able to atone for anything by having sex with Charlotte – regardless of what he might have intended when he went to Charlotte’s room, the scene plays out to tear himself down, and the dream is no closer after he’s done so.

His isolation in that final panel is basically a visual representation of his own self-imposed punishment for his daring to think all of this was worth the price he, and more importantly everyone else, has paid for it.

In this way, this sequence and the one that follows in the torture chamber show us that Griffith’s change in attitude toward his acts of self harm v. self destruction comes down directly to the amount of self loathing he is experiencing, and in an intrinsically related way, how much value he places in himself, his own desire to feel better, and his ability to atone for his actions.

And I think it’s clear that things change for Griffith because of Guts. Whether he likes/recognizes it or not, by the time Guts leaves he’s also staked his self worth on what Guts thinks of him, because he loves him and craves his respect and admiration. Guts’ answer to “Do you think I’m cruel?” cuts deep, but not as deeply as being told that he essentially never had any of Guts’ love or respect in the first place, which is what he believes as Guts leaves (“Is this how badly you want to leave my grasp?” – see bthump’s excellent meta breaking this moment down in more detail).

It makes sense that this moment would deliver such a devastating blow to Griffith’s sense of worth that it makes his self loathing spiral out of control and leads to him tearing his life apart.

And indeed, I read something very similar going down in the guilt trip, when the Godhand essentially tell Griffith that not only did he never have Guts’ love, he was in fact never worthy of love in the first place, because he is evil, a monster, too cruel, dirty, and loathsome to deserve a way out of this hellish cycle he’s stuck in.

Redux: The Sacrifice as Self Destruction

As I broke down in my previous meta, my analysis of the Eclipse leads me to believe that during this sequence Griffith is choosing the sacrifice (self harm) and not the dream (repression).

Originally, I argued that repression played no part in the sacrifice. However, upon further reflection and lengthy discussion, I have come around to the idea that in fact it is still at play during the first half of the guilt trip. This is clearly the case, because Griffith actually does manage to make an “ends justify the means” argument with respect to his sacrifice of the BoTH, even confronted with an image of all those bodies laid at his feet.

With the Godhand’s encouragement, he is temporarily able to push past the guilt to keep proceeding toward that end goal, covered in blood, in the attempt to convince himself that all this death and suffering couldn’t be for nothing (“If I repent...”). As I noted in my previous analysis, I believe this logic would have been enough for Griffith if all he had to do is sacrifice his Hawks – but as we know, in order to become a monster, you have to sacrifice what you love most, and imo no positive or constructive logic about finally attaining his dream could lead Griffith to the conclusion that the dream is worth anything close to Guts’ life.

It seems that what actually makes the difference at the bitter end is the intervention of fate and the word of God during the Eclipse. The Godhand essentially don’t let Griffith go through with this line of utilitarian thinking, because right after emerging from “the reality within his conscious realm,” they bring him right back into the pile of corpses, only this time it’s portrayed in less abstract terms by evoking the battlefield directly.

The Godhand are effectively telling him right after he’s successfully made his rationalizations that there’s no washing that blood off – that he’s already evil (“That is you”) and there is no absolution waiting for him, only his destiny, which is to reap the evil he has sown. It’s like they specifically get him to make the justification one more time in order to condemn him for it.

They prevent him from shifting the focus back onto that end goal and instead re-emphasize what he’s done to get there (“Over those corpses…you have trampled”), to tell him that he must embrace the cause and effect of his actions (“Bear [your] evil and confront destiny”).

In this way, it’s ultimately a pronouncement of guilt from the veritable mouth of god that finally puts the nail in the coffin of Griffith’s dance between the ends and the means, repression and self harm. They definitively come out and say that there’s no more repressing this, there’s no world in which this will ever be okay. You’re just evil and all you have to look forward to is more evil. This is you.

Directly after this, at the moment of the sacrifice, Griffith has basically been brought to his absolute lowest point, where self destruction seems like the only option (keep in mind that he’s already tried and failed to kill himself). After the guilt trip he thinks he’s less than worthless – he’s been convinced that he’s evil, and deserves nothing but more evil and his own eternal suffering, to “bear his evil and confront destiny.” This is where the last moments of his (human) life swing toward self destruction once and for all.

From what we’ve seen already about how Griffith acts when he feels worthless and wants to self harm, at this point Griffith cannot possibly think that he deserves to benefit or gain anything – not a castle, not absolution, love, or care or human connection. All he deserves is eternal pain and suffering. And by making the sacrifice, Griffith is guaranteeing that belief in his own mind, by obliterating all the remaining goodness within himself by committing an evil act.

Choosing those “raven-black wings” over the lives of Guts and the Hawks is so contrary to what values we already know he believes in, this moment it’s basically just more fuel for the fire.

Contrast the sentiment behind this:

With this:

We’ve been shown that Griffith’s sense of ego is premised almost entirely on what he can do for others – he has left very little sense that he deserves anything for himself. That’s why the selfishness of the sacrifice is, imo, so personally destructive to him – because for someone who has such little sense of independent self or self worth, to make an entirely selfish choice is so contemptible, terrible, unforgivable in his mind that it completely destroys him.

We know that this same perceived selfishness is already his deepest source of guilt and trauma (the belief that he has put others in harm’s way for the sake of his own goals) – so agreeing to the sacrifice is a manifestation of that exact same guilt, just magnified a hundred times over. This act is him basically deciding to give up the pretense that any of his actions have ever been anything other than pure selfishness, cruelty, and evil, by fully embracing that evil and making an exchange for personal benefit, because in his mind there’s essentially no coming back from such a contemptible decision.

Griffith thus chooses the sacrifice as an act of self destruction, and it represents the choice to become exactly everything he always feared he was, to let go of his responsibility to do the right thing by proving that the Godhand (and Guts, or so he thinks) were right all along, by finally making a truly evil choice and thereby validating his belief that he has always been evil and therefore deserves to suffer for eternity.

This is what I mean by the sacrifice being an act of self harm and “spiritual” suicide, not just because he’s basically killing himself, but because the whole impetus is based around actively destroying all the things that he valued about himself – his own soul – everything that made him good and human in his own eyes (and like, this is exactly what Femto, the result of this choice, is). This decision is based around tearing his entire sense of humanity to shreds, by doing the worst thing to himself that he could possibly imagine (making an exchange for personal benefit and sacrificing his most dearly beloved) and becoming the embodiment of that cruel and violent world order he always hated.

The way I think of this as suicide isn’t at all about making him feel better, because it’s not ultimately giving him absolution/justification for or abdication from his actions, it’s giving him the exact opposite – proof of his cruelty in the form of raven-black wings, which are basically just the evidence he’s been looking for all along that he deserves to suffer. It’s also not a depiction of true suicide, which would be an actual escape from his pain. Though this is still an escape in a way – not from his pain but into it.

Conclusions

While all the acts of self harm/destruction we see Griffith undertake throughout the Golden Age (the scratching, Gennon, Charlotte, the torture chamber, and the sacrifice) have varying elements of repression within them, because that’s still Griffith’s default response to his guilt, each are still ultimately acts of self harm/destruction because they result in tearing himself down and they actively function to make him feel worse – this is succumbing to the pain rather than trying to shield himself from it. None of these moments succeed at helping him along the path to the dream or making him feel better about himself, because none are functionally designed to.

And in saying this, I’m not also implying Griffith didn’t want his own suffering to end at different points in his life. I think after being tortured he wanted to die and end his suffering, after the soup-behelit/nightmare sequence he wanted to die and end his suffering, obviously, he attempts suicide after all. But the guilt trip is the ultimate difference in the end – the guilt trip is what convinces Griffith that he doesn’t deserve to end his suffering. That even his own “death” should be in the name of greater suffering.

Ultimately, what we can understand from this is that, despite the fact that he tries to pretend otherwise, when Griffith scratches himself it has nothing to do with attaining the dream, it’s not ultimately justifying anything other than his own belief that he deserves to suffer – he’s basically always just doing it to feel worse about himself.

When he has sex with Gennon, the specific act he chooses to take is one that is designed to hurt himself – there would have been many different ways to throw himself back into the dream in order to earn money without putting people at risk: for example he could have taken on some mercenary jobs personally, or sought out some non-combative work for interested Hawks – specifically why he chooses to have sex with a child predator is because he wants to punish himself for getting others killed, to atone through his own suffering. Choosing to have sex with a child predator as an act in isolation doesn’t advance the dream, only the end result (money) does. And that money could have been obtained in objectively less harmful and potentially more fruitful routes to that same goal.

Similarly, with Charlotte, his having sex with her, his leaving in broad daylight, his taunting the King, etc. – I read Griffith making those choices because some part of him wanted to destroy himself, to actively torpedo the dream because in some sense he has been brought to believe that he’s worthless and so is everything he’s staked his life on.

What he did in the river, with Charlotte, with the King, even the sacrifice – none of these events had to go down the way they did. The way they went down was basically arranged to destroy every one of those “sad and frightening things,” including the dream and his own life.

In conclusion, I hope that this meta shows how centrally important the logic of Griffith’s self harm is to his actions throughout the narrative of the Golden Age. His beliefs about himself and his own suffering are shown to us to consistently shape his choices, and I think it’s also clear that this logic persists through Femto’s actions after the Golden Age.

I have some more metas planned where I’m thinking of fleshing some more stuff out that spawned out of my original meta and subsequent discussions around it, so keep out an eye for those if you’re interested.

As always, if you have any thoughts about any of this I would be very interested to hear from you.

Thank you so much for reading!

#berserk #berserkmeta #griffith #griffithmeta #griffguts

214 notes · View notes

hexalt · 4 years

Text

CW for discussion of suicide

- She's the crazy ex-girlfriend - What? No, I'm not. - She's the crazy ex-girlfriend - That's a sexist term! - She's the crazy ex-girlfriend - Can you guys stop singing for just a second? - She's so broken insiiiiiide! - The situation's a lot more nuanced than that!

There’s the essay! You get it now. JK.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the culmination of Rachel Bloom’s YouTube channel (and the song “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” in particular where she combined her lifelong obsession with musical theatre and sketch comedy and Aline Brosh McKenna stumbling onto Bloom’s channel one night while having an idea for a television show that subverted the tropes in scripts she’d been writing like The Devil Wears Prada and 27 Dresses.

The show begins with a flashback to teenage Rebecca Bunch (played by Bloom) at summer camp performing in South Pacific. She leaves summer camp gushing about the performance, holding hands with the guy she spent all summer with, Josh Chan. He says it was fun for the time, but it’s time to get back to real life. We flash forward to the present in New York, Rebecca’s world muted in greys and blues with clothing as conservative as her hair.

She’s become a top tier lawyer, a career that she doesn’t enjoy but was pushed into by her overprotective, controlling mother. She’s just found out she’s being promoted to junior partner, and that’s just objectively, on paper fantastic, right?! ...So why isn’t she happy? She goes out onto the streets in the midst of a panic attack, spilling her pills all over the ground, and suddenly sees an ad for butter asking, “When was the last time you were truly happy?” A literal arrow and beam of sunlight then point to none other than Josh Chan. She strikes up a conversation with him where he tells her he’s been trying to make it in New York but doesn’t like it, so he’s moving back to his hometown, West Covina, California, where everyone is just...happy.

The word echoes in her mind, and she absorbs it like a pill. She decides to break free of the hold others have had over her life and turns down the promotion of her mother’s dreams. I didn’t realize the show was a musical when I started it, and it’s at this point that Rebecca is breaking out into its first song, “West Covina”. It’s a parody of the extravagant, classic Broadway numbers filled with a children’s marching band whose funding gets cut, locals joining Rebecca in synchronized song and dance, and finishing with her being lifted into the sky while sitting on a giant pretzel. This was the moment I realized there was something special here.

With this introduction, the stage has been set for the premise of the show. Each season was planned with an overall theme. Season one is all about denial, season two is about being obsessed with love and losing yourself in it, season three is about the spiral and hitting rock bottom, and season four is about renewal and starting from scratch. You can see this from how the theme songs change every year, each being the musical thesis for that season.

We start the show with a bunch of cliché characters: the crazy ex-girlfriend; her quirky sidekick; the hot love interest; his bitchy girlfriend; and his sarcastic best friend who’s clearly a much better match for the heroine. The magic of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is that no one in West Covina is the sum of their tropes. As Rachel says herself, “People aren’t badly written, people are made of specificities.”

The show is revolutionary for the authenticity with which it explores various topics but for the sake of this piece, we’ll discuss mental health, gender, Jewish identity, and sexuality. All topics that Bloom has dug into in her previous works but none better than here.

Simply from the title, many may be put off, but this is a story that has always been about deconstructing stereotypes. Rather than being called The Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, where the story would be from an outsider’s perspective, this story is from that woman’s point of view because the point isn’t to demonize Rebecca, it’s to understand her. Even if you hate her for all the awful things she’s doing.

The musical numbers are shown to be in Rebecca’s imagination, and she tells us they’re how she processes the world, but as she starts healing in the final season, she isn’t the lead singer so often anymore and other characters get to have their own problems and starring roles. When she does have a song, it’s because she’s backsliding into her former patterns.

While a lot of media will have characters that seem to have some sort of vague disorder, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend goes a step further and actually diagnoses Rebecca with Borderline Personality Disorder, while giving her an earnest, soaring anthem. She’s excited and relieved to finally have words for what’s plagued her whole life.

When diagnosing Rebecca, the show’s team consulted with doctors and psychiatrists to give her a proper diagnosis that ended up resonating with many who share it. BPD is a demonized and misunderstood disorder, and I’ve heard that for many, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the first honest and kind depiction they’ve seen of it in media. Where the taboo of mental illness often leads people to not get any help, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend says there is freedom and healing in identifying and sharing these parts of yourself with others.

Media often uses suicide for comedy or romanticizes it, but Crazy Ex-Girlfriend explored what’s going through someone’s mind to reach that bottomless pit. Its climactic episode is written by Jack Dolgen (Bloom’s long-time musical collaborator, co-songwriter and writer for the show) who’s dealt with suicidal ideation. Many misunderstood suicide as the person simply wanting to die for no reason, but Rebecca tells her best friend, “I didn’t even want to die. I just wanted the pain to stop. It’s like I was out of stories to tell myself that things would be okay.”

Bloom has never shied away from heavy topics. The show discusses in song the horrors of what women do to their bodies and self-esteem to conform to beauty standards, the contradiction of girl power songs that tell you to “Put Yourself First” but make sure you look good for men while doing it, and the importance of women bonding over how terrible straight men are are near and dear to her heart. This is a show that centers marginalized women, pokes fun at the misogyny they go through, and ultimately tells us the love story we thought was going to happen wasn’t between a woman and some guy but between her and her best friend.

I probably haven’t watched enough Jewish TV or film, but to me, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the most unapologetic and relatable Jewish portrayal I’ve seen overall. From Rebecca’s relationship with her toxic, controlling mother (if anyone ever wants to know what my mother’s like, I send them “Where’s the Bathroom”) to Patti Lupone’s Rabbi Shari answering a Rebecca that doesn’t believe in God, “Always questioning! That is the true spirit of the Jewish people,” the Jewish voices behind the show are clear.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend continues to challenge our perceptions when a middle-aged man with an ex-wife and daughter realizes he’s bisexual and comes out in a Huey Lewis saxophone reverie. The hyper-feminine mean girl breaks up with her boyfriend and realizes the reason she was so obsessed with getting him to commit to her is the same reason she’s so scared to have female friends. She was suffering under the weight of compulsory heterosexuality, but thanks to Rebecca, she eventually finds love and friendship with women.

This thread is woven throughout the show. Many of the characters tell Rebecca when she’s at her lowest of how their lives would’ve never changed for the better if it wasn’t for her. She was a tornado that blew through West Covina, but instead of leaving destruction in her wake, she blew apart their façades, forcing true introspection into what made them happy too.

Rebecca’s story is that of a woman who felt hopeless, who felt no love or happiness in her life, when that’s all she’s ever wanted. She tried desperately to fill that void through validation from her parents and random men, things romantic comedies had taught her matter most but came up empty. She tried on a multitude of identities through the musical numbers in her mind, seeing herself as the hero and villain of the story, and eventually realized she’s neither because life doesn’t make narrative sense.

It takes her a long time but eventually she sees that all the things she thought would solve her problems can’t actually bring her happiness. What does is the real family she finds in West Covina, the town she moved to on a whim, and finally having agency over herself to use her own voice and tell her story through music.

The first words spoken by Rebecca are, “When I sang my solo, I felt, like, a really palpable connection with the audience.” Her last words are, “This is a song I wrote.” This connection with the audience that brought her such joy is something she finally gets when she gets to perform her story not to us, the TV audience, but to her loved ones in West Covina. Rebecca (and Rachel) always felt like an outcast, West Covina (and creating the show) showed her how cathartic it is to find others who understand you.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the prologue to Rebecca’s life and the radical story of someone getting better. She didn’t need to change her entire being to find acceptance and happiness, she needed to embrace herself and accept love and help from others who truly cared for her. Community is what she always needed and community is what ultimately saved her.

P.S. If you have Spotify... I also process life through music, so I made some playlists related to the show because what better way to express my deep affection for it than through song?

CXG parodies, references, and is inspired by a lot of music from all kinds of genres, musicals, and musicians. Same goes for the videos themselves. I gathered all of them into one giant playlist along with the show’s songs.

A Rebecca Bunch mix that goes through her character arc from season 1 to 4.

I’m shamelessly a fan of Greg x Rebecca, so this is a mega mix of themselves and their relationship throughout the show.

I’m in a TV group where we wrote essays on our favorite shows of the 2010s, so here is mine on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, I realized I forgot to ever post it. Also wrote one for Schitt’s Creek.

#crazy ex girlfriend #crazyexedit #cxg #ceg #crazy ex gf #writing #mine #mental illness #bpd #mental health #spotify #music #playlist #essay #*

301 notes · View notes

bubonickitten · 4 years

Link

Summary: Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path.

Previous chapter: AO3 // tumblr

Chapter 15 full text & content warnings below the cut.

CWs for Chapter 15: mentions of Buried-related trauma (claustrophobia, etc.); a somewhat lengthy discussion of recurrent suicidal ideation (including some informal safety planning); panic/anxiety symptoms; mild self-harm (as a stim to distract from anxiety/intrusive thoughts); swears; mentions of starvation & restrictive behaviors re: Jon’s statement dependence (also some internalized ableism re: the substance dependence/addiction parallels); internalized victim blaming; post-traumatic stress reactions/flashbacks re: Jonah-typical awfulness. SPOILERS through Season 5.

Also, apologies in advance, but ADHD!Jon Went Off for several paragraphs at one point in this chapter and I (and by extension Martin) just let him run with it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Chapter 15: What Comes After

Jon sits on the floor with his back to the wall, waiting as Basira helps Daisy wash away nearly eight months of grime. Through the closed door and underneath the rapid drumbeat of water, he can make out a steady stream of murmured conversation, punctuated by the occasional sob or bitten-back groan of pain. The words are indistinct, but Jon doesn’t need to Know what is being said to guess the gist of it.

Eventually, the shower turns off. It takes several more minutes before the door opens. Even though Jon knows what to expect, he has to suppress a sympathetic grimace when he lays eyes on Daisy.

She sits hunched forward on the closed toilet lid, damp hair hanging limp around her face and dripping onto the tile floor. There is a sickly pallor to her skin, mottled with bruising and scrubbed-raw patches of pink. The clothes she’s wearing are her own – Basira never could bring herself to discard her things – but they no longer fit. Her shirt practically drowns her emaciated frame now, hanging loose off of one shoulder and exposing the hollows of her collarbone. The dark shadows under her puffy, bloodshot eyes might just rival Jon’s.

“Better?” Jon gives her a weak half-smile.

“Cleaner,” Daisy says hoarsely, staring listlessly at the floor.

“Your turn,” Basira says, meeting Jon’s eyes and jerking her head back towards the shower. “Left the shower stool in there for you. Clean clothes are on the counter.”

“Thanks,” Jon says, but he doesn't move. Part of his brain is telling him to stand; another, more reasonable part is just now realizing that sitting on the floor in the first place was probably a bad idea.

“Do you, uh – need help?”

“No,” Jon says hurriedly, “that – won’t be necessary.”

“No, I wasn’t suggesting –” Basira sighs, flustered. “I just meant that maybe you want to wait until Georgie gets here?”

Now that the adrenaline is fading, Jon’s skin is crawling with every moment the Buried still clings to him. Every slight movement sends loose dirt raining down onto the floor. He needs a shower.

“If you could just help me stand up, I should be able to handle the rest.”

Basira gives a curt nod, quickly recovering from the awkward moment, and hauls him to his feet. Steadying himself against the wall with one hand, he tests putting weight on his bad leg.

“Daisy still needs to see a doctor, and –” Basira frowns, watching Jon wince as he takes a step forward. “Are you sure you’ll be alright? You’re not going to – pass out and drown in two inches of water, are you?”

It wouldn’t kill me, Jon tries to say, wry and only half-joking.

“Not enough to kill me outright,” he says instead. When he feels that familiar static-laden filter slide into place in his mind, he freezes. Before the fear can properly move in, though, Basira’s voice cuts through his stirring panic.

“You’re alright, Jon,” she says, authoritative but without heat. “Just breathe through it, remember?”

Jon nods distractedly, shutting his eyes and focusing on his own breathing. It takes a minute, but the pressure eventually eases enough for him to hear himself think again.

“Are you okay?” Daisy asks, brow furrowed.

“Yes. Sorry.” Just those two simple words are a struggle to vocalize, but once he manages, the rest of the weight lifts from his thoughts. He glances at Basira. “I’m sorry, it just – slipped out, and –”

“It’s fine.” Basira looks him up and down. “I think maybe you should wait for Georgie, though.”

“I’ll be fine. It’s just my leg, and I’m used to dealing with that on my own.”

“I thought you injured your ribs.”

“Archivist,” he says with a shrug – a mistake, he realizes a moment too late, as it disturbs his injuries. He just barely manages to avoid flinching. “I heal quickly.”

The truth is, his ribs are unlikely to fully heal until he gets a statement in him. In fact, the last time, his weakness only started to fade after he’d taken a live statement. He’d rather not dwell on that right now, though.

“Hm.” Basira fixes him with a skeptical look.

“I’ll be alright, I promise. You should see to Daisy.”

“No,” Daisy says. Both Basira and Jon glance over at her. A noticeable full-body shiver sweeps over her, and Basira grabs a dry towel from the small stack on the counter.

“You need professional medical attention,” Basira says firmly, wrapping the towel around Daisy and adjusting it to cover her bare arms. “I’m taking you to A&E.”

Daisy ignores her, raising her head to look at Jon instead.

“I was thinking I could – stay, if you want?” She casts her eyes down again and her voice drops to a low murmur. “It’s just – the shower, it’s – a tight space, and – and it might…”

Jon bites the inside of his cheek. It’s true: the shower stall is tiny. Claustrophobic. The room itself is small and poorly ventilated; steam builds up within a minute of the shower being turned on, turning the air thick and stifling with humidity. The single dim light in the ceiling has a tendency to flicker; the bulb has been known to come loose from time to time, plunging the area into near-darkness.

It isn’t the Buried, but there’s enough here to bring the Coffin to mind on a bad day – and especially right now, less than two hours out of the place.

The last time, Daisy never could manage to use the shower without someone else in the room to keep her company. When Basira was unavailable, she would turn to Jon. Eventually, he got comfortable with her returning the favor. It became a routine, but…

“I’ll be okay,” he says again. Unconvincingly, judging from the way Daisy’s eyes narrow at him.

“Do you really want to be alone right now?”

“I…”

No, I don’t. I really, really don’t.

“Look, I’m not trying to make it – weird,” Daisy continues, fiddling with one corner of her towel. “It’s not like I’ll see you through the curtain. I just thought – maybe you could use some company? Don’t say ‘I’m fine,’” she says as he opens his mouth to respond. “Just because you can deal with it alone doesn’t mean you should have to.”

“Well, yes, but –”

“Do you not want me here? Because if you really want me to leave, I will, but –”

“No, I wouldn’t mind the company, honestly, but –”

“Then I’ll stay.” She looks at Basira, as if daring her to object.

Last time, she did object, Jon remembers. Now, though… Basira simply sighs.

“Fine. But,” she adds emphatically, giving Daisy a severe look, “I’m taking you to A&E as soon as Georgie gets here, and you don’t get to argue.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Daisy says with a tired grin.

“Liar,” Basira says, shaking her head with a fond, amused sort of resignation. “I’ll be just outside if you need me.”

As Basira leaves, Jon catches Daisy’s eye.

“Thank you,” he murmurs.

“Thank you,” Daisy says at the exact same time. “For not leaving me.”

Their tentative, exhausted smiles are mirror images of one another as understanding passes between them.

Someone upstairs has a statement.

The Archivist Knew the moment she mounted the steps to the Institute. She was marked by the Spiral, the Hunt, and the Lonely in quick succession, but the Archivist can only barely make out the edges of the story: how she was pursued through a nonsensical, constantly-shifting maze of alleyways by a hulking thing that always stayed one step behind, never letting her escape but never deigning to actually catch her.

There was no one in that place to hear her screams. Now, all she wants is to be heard.

The Archivist can give that to her. It would be so easy, so right. She came to the Magnus Institute of her own volition, didn’t she? She’s here to give her statement. The Archivist can take it from her and preserve her voice and relive her story for the rest of –

Jon twists his fingers in his hair and pulls until it hurts.

“You need to sit down,” Georgie says for the third time in as many minutes.

“Just keeping warm.”

It’s not necessarily a lie. The perpetual damp chill of the tunnels seeps into Jon’s bones in spite of his three layers of clothing and Georgie’s scarf wrapped twice around his neck. Beyond that, though, fevered movement is the only thing keeping him from falling to pieces. If he stops or slows, it will become all the more obvious how badly he’s trembling and all the more difficult to ignore the hunger gnawing away at him.

“You’re not even pacing, you’re just – limping.” When he doesn’t reply, Georgie reaches out and touches his shoulder. “Sit. We have some time before Martin gets here.”

With a sigh, Jon finally capitulates, sinking into the nearest chair. Immediately, he starts to jiggle one leg, fingers tapping restlessly on his knees.

“Talk to me, Jon,” Georgie says, taking a seat opposite him. “What’s on your mind?”

“I… I don’t know. It’s – a lot, and…”

He trails off, unsettled at the sound of his own voice, shaking almost as badly as the rest of him. His mouth has gone too dry to comfortably swallow, and every passing thought feels blurry around the edges, too ephemeral to translate into the spoken word. The only thing coming through loud and clear is the need and the knowledge that he has the means to sate it, if he would only embrace it.

There are no words to describe the experience, nor does he wish to verbalize it in the first place. As for the rest of it…

“Of course now I can talk,” he says with a weak laugh, “I suddenly don’t know what to say.”

“Take your time.”

Jon hunches forward, allowing himself to rock back and forth in slight movements as he tries to gather his thoughts.

“I’m –” Hungry. Terrified. Exhausted. Weak. Hungry, craving, needing, wanting – “At a loss.”

“About why you can talk again?”

Yes. Sure. He can go with that. It isn’t a lie, and it feels like a safer topic than all the rest.

“In part. I don’t understand why I have my voice back, or what that means, and of course my mind is immediately going to the worst-case explanations, and” – now he’s started, he rapidly gains momentum, his speech growing pressured and frantic – “I should just be grateful that I can use my own words again, but I can’t just let it go, because when have I ever been able to just let something go, and –” He tugs on a lock of hair again, letting out a self-deprecating chuckle. “Unsurprisingly, I hate not knowing.”

“Well… how about starting with that? Give me some theories. Might help to get them out of your head for a minute.”

“Most of it comes down to… I don’t know – why now, I suppose? I don’t have an answer to that, which just makes me think – did I have a choice all along?” It’s a question that has been plaguing him for hours, sitting poised and ready to spring in the back of his mind, but as he finally speaks it aloud, a chill comes over him. His voice fractures like a crack spreading weblike through thin ice. “This whole time, was I just… not trying hard enough?”

“I don’t think –”

“It was the same with taking statements,” he blurts out, wide-eyed and wound taut. “When the others discovered what I was doing, I stopped, which means I – I could have done all along, and just – didn’t.”

“You implied before that you were sort of – influenced?” Georgie’s voice is thoughtful, not accusatory; her expression searching, but not judgmental. Jon can feel his shoulders relax just slightly.

“‘Influenced’ is one way to put it, yes. But not controlled, exactly – not quite. It was – instinctual, almost? And once a story starts, it’s sort of like – being in a trance, I suppose.”

“I remember you having a kind of… faraway look to you, when I was telling you my story.”

“It wasn’t like that in the very beginning,” he says, watching his fingers curl on his bouncing knees. “I don’t know when they started having that effect on me. I… didn’t even notice the change. Didn’t notice that I was physically dependent on them until I was traveling. Started to get sick the longer I went without them. And when I woke up… just reading statements wasn’t enough anymore.” He draws in a measured breath. Gathers his thoughts. Exhales slowly. “The first time, I was just shopping. I felt – unwell, hazy. Then he was there, and I just – Asked, before I even realized what was happening. The next time was just after Melanie stabbed me –”

“She what?”

“It was – sort of deserved,” Jon says, waving it off. He continues before Georgie can get another word in. “I felt – drained, after. Thought I just needed some air, so I went for a walk. Wasn’t long before I crossed paths with my next – victim. Didn’t realize until much later that I must have been… hunting, subconsciously. Like a fugue, almost. But just before I Asked, I had this moment where I – I knew what I was about to do, and I just – did it anyway. And then the third time was –”

“After the Coffin,” Georgie guesses. The look on her face is that mixture of sadness and pity that haunted Jon in their shared nightmares for so long.

“Yes.” Jon keeps his eyes downcast. “And the fourth time was after I – well, I tried too hard to Know something, and it sort of – took it out of me.”

“So the trigger is being injured, or weakened?”

“Maybe in the beginning. The last time, though… I was feeling weak, yes, but there was no specific incident that precipitated it. Basira needed me at full strength for a mission. So I Knew where I could find a statement, and I made sure to be in the right place at the right time.” He wrings his hands in his lap. “But the mission was just the way I rationalized it to myself. I was just hungry. I would’ve fed regardless, and reached for whatever excuse was closest to hand, and felt guilty later, and – well, rinse and repeat.”

“You didn’t quite answer when I asked before, but… is it an addiction, or is it sustenance?”

“It’s a… need.” Jon bites his lip in thought. “Feels like addiction sometimes, but the compulsion is worse than nicotine cravings ever were. And when I tried to stop, it – it wasn’t only withdrawal. I actually was starving. Still don’t know if it would have actually killed me, but…” He shrugs. “Suppose we’ll find out.”

“Jon –”

“But I – I need you to understand,” Jon says, jolting up straight in his seat. “I’m not making excuses. I’m done making excuses, there are no excuses, just – explanations. I was influenced, yes, and it often felt like being – enthralled, but I still… I knew that I was dangerous, that what I was doing was wrong. If I thought I couldn’t help myself, I should’ve told the others from the start and they would’ve done what was necessary. I always felt ashamed after, but I still – kept doing it, until I was forced to stop.”

He’s ranting at full-tilt now, breath quickening and heart stuttering in his throat.

“I didn’t just need it, Georgie, I wanted it. I – I liked it. It felt good. And I know for a fact that it still would, if I let myself do it again. I’ve seen the consequences of becoming – that, and I still…” His shoulders sag. “I miss it. I’m afraid I’ll never stop wanting it, I hate myself for that, and it changes nothing.”

“You’re hungry now, aren’t you?” Georgie asks gently.

Jon tsks and pinches the bridge of his nose. “That obvious, is it?”

“Mm.” She gives him a sympathetic smile. “You seem more jittery than usual. And you’re shaking.”

“Ravenous,” he says with a bitter laugh. “Worst I’ve been in – a long while, and it’s only going to get worse.”

He lets his gaze drift to the floor as he briefly debates whether to share the details. She should probably know what manner of monster she’s dealing with.

“Actually, ah – someone upstairs has a statement,” he says before he can lose his nerve. “She was writing it out just before we came down here, and I could See the shape of it, but not the whole story, and now I can’t See her anymore, and I – I need –” He runs a frustrated hand through his hair, scraping ragged fingernails against his scalp. “Christ, Georgie, it’s all I can do not to rush up there and rip it out of her.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“Not yours, either. Don’t,” Georgie says, cutting him off when he opens his mouth to launch into another tirade. “I’m not saying that you were justified in hurting people. But you didn’t choose to be… this.”

“I may not have wanted it,” he says flatly, “but I did choose it.”

“How so?”

She sounds genuinely curious, not confrontational, which keeps him from going on the defensive. Instead, the question gives Jon pause.

“I… I don’t know how to explain it,” he says slowly, frowning. “Just – something Jonah said to me, and it – feels right.”

“He said that to you?” Georgie’s eyes narrow as she watches him. “Those words?”

“Yes?” Jon squirms in his seat; sometimes, Georgie’s scrutiny is on par with that of the Beholding. “A long time ago. Before the Unknowing, even. When I realized that I was becoming something – not human, and confronted him about it.”

Georgie taps a knuckle against her lips, looking down at the floor in thought.

“Jon, I’m going to say something, and I want you to think about it – really think about it, don’t just discard it offhand. Alright?”

“Okay?” Jon says, apprehension flooding him.

Georgie takes a breath and looks him in the eye.

“Supernatural flavor aside, that’s just how abusers talk in order to groom their victims.”

Jon recoils as if struck and shoves the information away from him almost as soon as the words leave her mouth.

“Does it really matter?” It comes out far more harshly than he had intended, closer to a shout than a comment, and he cringes. “Sorry. It’s just – he had a point.”

“Jon –”

“No, I chose to keep looking for answers at every turn,” Jon says, gesticulating wildly. “I’ve never known when to just stop, no matter how many times people get hurt from it. I was a perfect fit for the Beholding, the perfect candidate for Jonah to do with what he will, and I – I still am. Doesn’t matter if I wanted this outcome. I still sought it out. Moth to a fucking flame.”

“Doesn’t mean you chose it, and it doesn’t mean you deserved what happened to you,” Georgie says. For some reason that Jon can’t quite pinpoint, the quiet confidence with which she speaks grates on his nerves. “And anyway, it seems to me you’re doing a decent job at controlling yourself now.”

“Yeah.” He huffs. “Only it took Basira threatening to kill me.”

“She what?”

“Not recently. In my future. It was warranted,” he says with a dismissive gesture. Then he sighs, slouching in his seat. “And I don’t know if even that threat would have stopped me forever. Didn’t have to find out. I managed to end the world first, and then I had all the fear I could ever want.”

The moment he stops speaking, his mind once again drifts to the statement ripe for the taking just upstairs. His bitter expression turns anguished and he buries his face in his hands.

“I want to kill the part of me that misses it. That might just kill all of me, but honestly, Georgie, I don’t – I don’t know if that would be such a bad thing –” He chokes on his words and looks up at her with wide, frantic eyes. “I – I’m sorry, I didn’t – I shouldn’t have said –” He takes a deep breath and forces assurance into his voice when he says, “I’m not suicidal.”

“I won’t be angry if you are,” Georgie says evenly, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I’m not suicidal,” he says again, but he looks away as he does, unable to meet her eyes. “I don’t – want to die. I just feel like as long as I’m around, everyone – everything is in danger, and – what right to I have to make that decision for the world? It’s – selfish, and – I really don’t deserve a second chance, especially when part of me still…”

Jon swallows hard. Once again, he wonders if the woman with the statement is still here. He pinches the skin of his arm and twists. Noticing the tic, Georgie frowns and opens her mouth to redirect him, but he carries on speaking, undeterred.

“I think the only reason I chose to wake up again is because I needed to help Daisy and Martin. I think the only reason I’m still alive now is because I don’t want to leave Martin alone. Or – no, that makes it sound out of obligation or – or guilt. It's not that. It's – I – I want to be with him, I do. I actively want to – to have a life with him, just – live, be. If not for that, though, I… I’m tired, Georgie.”

Tired of hurting and being hurt, of watching and being watched. Tired of hunger and want and an existence that hinges upon the misery of others. Tired loss and scars and nightmares. Tired of having to settle for not wanting to die instead of wanting to live. Tired of just surviving instead of actually living.

“I’m just tired,” he says, putting his head in his hands again. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear this.”

“I would rather you talk about it than keep it bottled up.”

“I just don’t want you to think that I’m not trying to get better.”

“Recovery isn’t linear. I’m not going to leave just because you have bad days. It would be different if you were closed off, denying you have a problem, but… you’re not.” When he doesn’t answer, her frown deepens. Her next words sound almost affronted. “I’ve been suicidal, Jon, you know that. Why do you think I’d hold it against you? I know you can’t just flip a switch to make it go away. Why are you so afraid –” Realization dawns on her face. “I left last time, didn’t I?”

“I never regained autonomy in the nightmares, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to you before I woke up.” Jon shrugs halfheartedly. “You didn’t expect me to wake up. Then I did, and I didn’t have any of the complications to be expected from a six-months coma. Not even a coma, really, just – everything but brain dead. A corpse coming back to life – I think it was too much for you. You told me I needed people to keep me human, and by the time I took that advice there was no one left to turn to, and now I wasn’t human anymore. It kept me from dying, but you didn’t think it was a second chance.”

“I said that to you?”

“The, uh, last bit,” he says reluctantly. He doesn’t blame Georgie for leaving, but he can’t deny that her parting words to him on that day still sting, even now – a resounding condemnation that he can’t quite shake. “But you weren’t wrong,” he says, rushing to reassure her when he sees the horrified look on her face. “It wasn’t a second chance, it was just… the next phase of the Archivist’s development. Anyway, you were tired of watching me self-destruct, you knew there was nothing you could to do change my trajectory, and you didn’t want me to drag you down with me. Or Melanie. Her life had – has, I suppose – been nothing but misery since the day she met me. She was trying to get out, to get better.”

“And you?”

“I wanted to, but I just… couldn’t see a way out. I couldn’t leave, but I…” He bites down hard on his lower lip, struggling with his next words. “I don’t think I was choosing to stay involved, either.”

“And I thought you were.”

“You weren’t the only one. And it wasn’t an unfair assumption. I was” – am, his brain corrects – “in too deep. I didn’t” – don’t, he reminds himself –“belong in normal life anymore. I couldn’t” – can’t, he does not say aloud – “reverse the change. Even when I found out how to quit… I couldn’t just leave Martin here alone. Also, I know now that it wouldn’t have worked for me anyway.”

“It would’ve killed you,” she guesses.

“No such luck,” he says with a short laugh, then feels his blood drain from his face. He looks up and fixes her with a panicked, apologetic look. “Sorry, I – that was in poor taste, it’s just – that was what went through my mind when I first realized it.”

“It’s alright.”

Jon clears his throat, still somewhat shamefaced.

“What I mean is that I, ah, tried to blind myself during the Ritual. Turns out I heal too quickly for it to have any effect on my connection with the Beholding. Otherwise I’d have tried it again the moment I woke up in the hospital.”

Georgie says nothing. When he chances a glimpse of her, he sees no judgment or anger, just more of that familiar, gentle sadness. He has to look away again.

“I don’t blame you for walking away back then. You didn’t have the whole picture. Neither did I, but even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have given you all the details, and you knew that. I can’t fault you for not wanting to stay involved when you didn’t know what being involved would actually entail.” He looks up and meets her eyes. “Honestly, Georgie, even if you’d stayed, I probably would have made all the same mistakes. I would have continued putting myself in danger and downplaying it. I would still have gone into the Coffin, and I wouldn’t have told you where I was going beforehand. I would likely have distanced myself from you on my own, because I’d have convinced myself it was in your best interests without asking you how you felt about it. I’ve… changed since then, but at the time, I probably would have continued retracing the same patterns. You would have only gotten hurt, even if it wasn’t my intention.”

“Maybe.” She frowns, chin propped on her fist as she considers. “I can’t speak for a version of me that doesn’t exist anymore. But for what it’s worth, I’m sorry you were alone.”

“And I’m sorry I didn’t realize how much I didn’t want to be alone until it was too late.”

“It’s not too late now, though,” she says with a cautious smile.

“No, I suppose not.” Jon’s answering smile fades as he gives her a serious look. “None of this obligates you to stick around, by the way.”

“I know.”

“I’m serious. I’m glad you’re here, but…” It’s more than I deserve, he almost says, but stops himself when he imagines Georgie’s reaction to that. “I don't want things to become – toxic, between us. If it gets to be too much, I’ll understand.”

“If it does, it won’t be just because you had a setback. Just – try not to wallow too much when you do, alright? You’re not good company for yourself when you’re like that.”

“Yeah,” Jon concedes on a long exhale.

Georgie sighs, a pensive look on her face.

“I think I may have given you the wrong impression before. When I made you promise that you didn’t have a death wish, it wasn’t because I was going to leave if you’re suicidal. It was because I don’t want to be lied to about it if you are. I don’t want to be blindsided by your self-destruction, or made complicit in it. It isn’t fair to me.”

“I don’t want that either,” he says softly. “And I – I wasn’t lying before, when I promised you that the Coffin wasn’t a death wish. I just… I thought…”

“You thought you could make the decision to live once and be done with it.”

“Sounds foolish when you put it like that, but… yes, I suppose so.”

“Would be nice if it worked like that,” Georgie says with a rueful smile. Then she sighs. “I’m not expecting you to get better overnight, and neither should you – especially when you’re still in the thick of it. I’m just expecting you to communicate when things get bad, rather than throwing yourself onto the nearest grenade as – atonement, or punishment, or some misguided belief that you have to earn the right to live. I won’t be a party to that. I can’t. I don’t… hold it against you personally, I get it, I’ve been there – but that’s why I can’t be around it. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“To be clear,” she says emphatically, waiting until he meets her eye before continuing, “I don’t mind hearing about those thoughts. I take issue with you acting on them with no regard for yourself or the people around you, and then minimizing the consequences. And that – that isn’t a value judgment. It’s just… watching you get trapped in that cycle, it takes me to a bad place.” Georgie chews on her lip for a moment, and then nods, as if coming to a conclusion. “If you were looking for a boundary, there it is. I know you can’t avoid danger entirely, but when you’re feeling like this, can you at least promise to talk to someone before making any drastic decisions? You have to let us know if you’re in a bad way, because it will affect your judgment.”

Jon lets out a long exhale. “I will.”

“Okay. I can live with that.”

“Thank you,” he murmurs, self-conscious.

“About your voice, though.” Jon gives her a quizzical look. “I thought it was wholly a supernatural thing, but…” She looks up at the ceiling, gathering her thoughts, and then adopts a delicate tone. “Have you considered that it might also be a – a trauma response?”

“I didn’t before.”

“And now?”

“I… I don’t know. It first started partway through the apocalypse. The more I experienced, the more the Archive asserted itself. I was still me, most of the time, but I was also – more, I suppose? It’s… complicated.” Jon rakes his fingers through his hair as he works on his phrasing. “The human mind was never meant to contain that… much. The Archive’s purpose is to – well, to archive. Every instance of fear and suffering in that place was a statement. Billions of them, every moment recorded live – and when I read or take a statement, I live it vicariously. My own experience of it is… an essential part of the recording process.” He blows out a puff of air. “So I had a lot going through my head at any given moment. The human in me couldn’t be conscious of all of it at the same time.”

“That’s… horrible.”

“Yes. And it felt right.” He rubs one arm absently, looking off to the side. “I don’t think I was meant to survive – the human part of me, that is. I was just one mind; I should have gotten lost in the multitude. And I did, sometimes, but… I always found my way back. Martin always called me back. If not for him…”

If not for him, Jon would have lost his sense of self in the Archive, given up and accepted the role assigned to him, much like he suspects Gertrude would have. When he lost Martin, Jon almost did lose himself as well.

“Either way, I was – above all else, I was still an Archive. I learned to compartmentalize, to an extent, but I was never meant to have my own voice. At some point, it got lost in all the noise. If I wanted to communicate, I could only use the stories hoarded away in the Archive.”

Jon frowns in consideration, actively weighing the most likely theories as he talks himself through the evidence.

“I… don’t think it was purely a psychological response,” he says slowly, gaining in confidence as he speaks the words. “I think it was a consequence of what I was in that place. The Archive was part of that world’s fabric, so to speak. But this reality operates differently than the one I came from. Its natural laws aren’t dictated by the Beholding. It has… less prominence here. Case in point, I’m significantly less powerful now than I was in my future.”

Georgie raises an eyebrow. “How powerful are we talking?”

“I was an apex predator among monsters. A direct conduit of the Ceaseless Watcher. Oh,” he adds offhandedly, “and I Knew everything.”

“What.”

“Well – almost everything. And not all at once. It was more that I – I was able to Know almost anything if I looked for the answer.” He allows himself a small grin. “Post-apocalyptic Google, so to speak.”

“Sounds… useful?”

“In some ways. It’s awful to say, but I miss it sometimes. Having control over it, mostly. I could stop myself from Knowing things about a person, give them more privacy. But I also couldn’t opt out of Knowing entirely. I just… had more control over what I Knew and when. And there were still things I couldn’t Know. The Beholding will hoard almost any scrap of information, but it has a clear preference for the horrific. It was utterly silent on anything related to an after – an afterlife, a reversal of the apocalypse, any sort of escape or release from the nightmare.”

“God,” Georgie murmurs, almost to herself.

“Jury’s out on that one, too.”

“No, I just meant –” Georgie pauses when she sees Jon smirk. “Oh, I see. You’re just being a smartass.” She shoots him a grin and nudges him with her foot. “What about now? Do you still –”

“I don’t have near as much control over it as I used to, no. I can remember the things that I consciously chose to Know then, but… that sea of knowledge, all those potential answers to any hypothetical questions – my access to it is limited now. And I’m Knowing things unintentionally again.”

“What about the Archive – the statements?”

“When I first woke up, it felt – the same as it did in the future. A sort of – wall of static that lowered whenever I tried to use my own words. It lifted in the Buried, because I was cut off from the Eye – from the Archive. I thought it would reassert itself when I came back – and it did for a minute – but now it’s…” Jon stares down at his hands, clenched tightly in his lap. “I still have recall of all the statements I already had archived. Not all at once, more like a – like a database, I suppose, but – they’re there if I look for them. The Archive is still there, and sometimes it slips through, but… it’s not as dominant as it was before. And seeing as I can speak at all, apparently state of mind is more of a factor than I thought. At least right now. Not sure about before.”

“Well,” Georgie says, “even if you have more control over it now, it doesn’t mean you always did. Sometimes circumstances change.”

“Maybe,” Jon says, his thoughts already beginning to stray.

Georgie sighs in exasperation.

“Just because there’s a future where things are better doesn’t mean you’re a failure for things being bad in the present. Jon, look at me.” He does, albeit reluctantly. “What you’ve gone through isn’t something that you just get over. It’s always going to be there. That doesn’t mean things will never get better. It just means that you need to make peace with the fact that you’ll have ups and downs. If you turn on yourself every time you’re struggling, you’ll never notice the moments of progress. And if you see every instance of progress as an opportunity to berate yourself for not achieving it sooner, then, well – I’m sorry, but things aren’t going to get better.”

“I – I know. It’s just…”

“Difficult. I know. I’ve been there.” Her expression softens. “I’m not trying to be harsh. I don’t expect one conversation to change the way you think. It takes years of practice to break that sort of pattern. But when you need reminders – and you will, and I won’t be disappointed when you do – I’m going to keep giving them to you. I’ll ask you to at least consider them each time before dismissing them outright. Does that sound fair?”

“More than,” Jon says, giving her a weak smile.

“Good, because I seem to recall you making the same request of me once upon a time.”

Did I? Jon thinks back and draws a blank. Not for the first time, he curses how unreliable his memory can be.

“Still,” he says, “I’m sorry to be such a –”

“If you say ‘burden’ or anything to that effect, I actually will be cross with you.”

“Noted,” Jon says with an embarrassed chuckle. “But – sincerely, I – I know that right now I’m –” Dead weight, he almost says. Volatile. Fragile. Tiresome. Untrustworthy. A walking doomsday button. Georgie gives him a warning look, silently urging him to consider his next words carefully. “Struggling,” he opts for. “But I do want to be there for you if you need me, in whatever way I can, so… open invitation to confide in me, or ask for help, or – or anything you need.”

“That was eloquent,” she replies with a teasing smirk. Jon rolls his eyes.

“Ironically, I think I was more eloquent when I was the Archive.”

“Eloquent in a poetic sense, maybe,” Georgie says with mock thoughtfulness, “but it didn’t lend itself to clarity.”

Another hunger pang rips through Jon's mind and he clenches his jaw, curling his shaking hands into fists.

“Hey.” Georgie prods his foot with hers again. “You ready to see Martin?”

“I, ah…” Jon gives a nervous laugh. “I want to see him more than anything, but I’m also – terrified? I know things won’t be how I remember them, I know I have to adjust my expectations, but I don’t know what to adjust them to, and I don’t know what to expect from myself, either, and…”

And the hunger is eating away at him from the inside out, an incessant undercurrent of need-want-feed running parallel with every other thought vying for his attention. He brings his hands to his face, puts pressure on his eyes, grounds himself in the ache. Almost immediately, his brain latches onto the words pressure and ground and suddenly he’s comparing the cravings to being buried alive, to drowning in noise, to being suffocated by the crush of stories that was – is – destined to comprise the entirety of his being. He’s being drawn over the threshold of that ubiquitous, baleful door in his mind: hated and feared, yes, but completing him all the same.

Guess that’s the thing about being the chosen one, Arthur Nolan’s words echo in the Archive’s halls. At the end of it, you’re always just the point of someone else’s story, everyone clamoring to say what you were, what you meant, and your thoughts on it all don’t mean nothing.

Jon tries to dislodge the statement, but there is no stop button to corral the Archive, and the story continues on: It seeds us with this… aching, impossible desire to change the world, to bring it to us.

There are hundreds of thousands of words pounding on the door now, none of them his own, an endless stream of them queuing up in his throat, cramming into his lungs – and with a painful lurch, he’s falling down, down, down –

Breathe, comes the familiar mantra.

On the one hand, he’s glad for how quickly and mindlessly that coping mechanism kicks in by now. On the other hand, he wishes he didn’t have so many opportunities to practice that it’s become so ingrained in the first place. There is something different about it this time, though. Usually, he imagines the command in his own voice, or occasionally Martin’s. Just now, he could pick out multiple tones, all overlapping: Martin. Georgie. Basira. Daisy. Himself.

The effect is potent. It allows him to walk himself back from the edge in record time. The hunger still scratches impatiently at the door, but he manages to tear his attention away from it long enough to remember where and when and who he is. When he glances back up, he realizes that only a few seconds have transpired – a storm so brief that apparently even Georgie didn’t register its passing. Instead, she’s staring over his shoulder. She catches his eye, raises her eyebrows, and nods, indicating something behind him.

“Well,” she says with a smile both amused and reassuring, “I think you’re about to find out.”

Another stab of panic shoots through him, shattering his momentary calm. Time stands still. When lightheadedness overtakes him and his vision starts to pixelate, he realizes that he’s been holding his breath. He lets out a juddering exhale, and turns around.

When he lays eyes on Martin, Jon is speechless all over again.

Martin startles when Jon’s eyes lock onto his, still unaccustomed to and unsettled by such direct eye contact. He immediately regrets that reaction when he watches Jon recoil and avert his eyes. The reflexive urge to vanish overtakes Martin then – and he feels himself begin to panic a little more when it yields no results. He had been accessing that power up until moments ago, when he dropped the veil; why is it out of reach now?

“Hi, Martin,” Georgie says, apparently unperturbed by the awkward atmosphere. “I was just keeping Jon company until you got here, but I’ll give you two some privacy now.” She stands, stretches, and brings one arm down to touch Jon’s shoulder. “I’ll be here for a while yet. If you need me, I’ll probably be in Melanie’s usual spot.”

Martin can see Jon incline his head slightly. If Jon sees her reassuring smile, he gives no indication. Georgie gives his shoulder another pat and starts to walk towards the ladder. Martin steps aside, giving her a wide berth – force of habit – and watches until the trapdoor closes behind her.

For what feels like an interminable moment, the stale air hangs heavy with silence. Martin stands rigid, mind drawing a blank. Could cut the tension in here with a bread knife, he thinks to himself, somewhat hysterically.

Jon, for his part, is staring steadfastly at the ground, utterly unmoving – and Martin’s heart wrenches painfully in his chest at the sight.

Of all the adjectives that could be used to describe Jonathan Sims, unmoving has never been one of them. When he’s not running his hands through his hair or scratching at his skin, he’s bouncing his legs, tapping his fingers, biting the insides of his cheeks, pacing, rocking in place – an endless rotation of fidgets and stims, flowing one into the next. When he’s excited, his eyes light up, intense and intelligent and impossible to break away from; he interrupts himself in his rush to translate his thoughts into speech before he loses them entirely; he’s a flurry of animated gestures and borderline manic pacing. Even at rest, his eyes are bright with questions and his hands flutter when he talks; even exhausted and lethargic, his mind is a hummingbird flitting from thought to thought with frantic abandon, eager to catalog every detail and cover every angle.

Sometimes, it’s vicariously exhausting to witness; most of the time, Martin is hopelessly endeared. In all the time that Martin has known him, the coma was the first time he ever saw Jon entirely still. Martin used to wish on occasion that he had more chances to just look at him. Up until that point, he’d had to make do with furtive glances and stolen moments when Jon was too engrossed in a task to notice Martin staring. In the hospital, Martin finally had a chance to really study him freely.

Stillness doesn’t suit him, Martin remembers thinking – and another piece of his heart chipped away.

Unconsciously, Martin finds himself studying Jon again now. He sits hunched forward with his arms folded tightly in front of him, a white-knuckled grip on each elbow, his narrow shoulders pulled in and forward. Judging from the predictably mussed state of his hair, he must have been combing his fingers through it nonstop recently. His lips are chapped and torn from chewing; the dark circles under his eyes seem to have shadows of their own. His multiple layers of clothing do nothing to hide the gauntness of his frame or the frailness of his wrists.

Jon is awake now, yes, but still he looks… distant. Listless. Too close to lifeless for comfort; too reminiscent of deathbeds and silent monitors and grey hospital linens. So Martin breaks the silence.

“Jon.”

He doesn’t raise his head, but his eyes flick upwards to gaze at Martin through his lashes. Sharp eyes, haunted eyes, more and more so with every passing day – and now, they’re downright bleak. Still, though, they’re beautiful: a rich brown, dark and deep enough to fall into, and Martin could lose himself in them gladly. Then, Jon breaks eye contact again, curling in on himself even further.

How is it that he manages to look more run down every time I see him? Martin thinks, and then he notices Jon’s hands, trembling in his lap now.

“You’re shaking.”

“Yes.” The word cracks on its way out, coming out as little more than a croak, and Jon clears his throat before trying again. “Just, ah – just hungry.”

“You’ve been back a few hours now, haven’t you eaten yet?” Martin replies automatically, the caretaker in him taking charge. “Jon, you were in there for over a week, you need to –”

“Not – not that kind of hunger.” Jon finally raises his head, but his eyes still dart away from Martin’s every few moments.

“Oh,” Martin says quietly. “Statements.”

“Yeah.” Jon scuffs one foot against the floor.

“W-well, I can wait, if you want to go record one?”

“No, I –” Jon clears his throat again, sitting up straighter in his seat. “I’d prefer to talk. If that’s alright with you. I’m – I’m sure you have questions for me.”

Martin considers. On the one hand, his instinct is to insist that Jon take care of himself first. On the other hand, he knows how stubborn Jon can be. Arguing about it wouldn’t change his mind, only waste time and ultimately leave him waiting longer for a meal.

“Yeah,” Martin says with a reluctant sigh, “I guess.”

“R-right. Well…” One end of Jon’s scarf trails in his lap, and he runs his fingertips over the weave, in the same way that one might pet a cat. “I – I’ll answer them as best I can.”

“Right,” Martin echoes.

“Would you like to sit?”

Martin nods wordlessly and takes a seat opposite Jon, but his mind goes blank again.

“Georgie said she explained things?” Jon tries tentatively.

“Sort of. She said she was working on an incomplete explanation herself.”

“Yes, that was – that was my fault. I was having some –”

“Speech difficulties, yeah. She said.”

“Which is also why my message to you was so…” Jon sighs. “I would have preferred to use my own words.”

“But did you mean it?” Martin blurts out. He feels his face heat in an instant and he has to look away.

“Yes,” Jon says quietly. Confidently, Martin notes privately, and blushes more deeply. “The sentiment was all mine. I know it may seem – out of the blue, from your perspective, but I – I meant it, all of it.” Jon ducks his head, but doesn’t look away. “I, uh – I still do.”

It’s Martin’s turn to break eye contact, keen to look anywhere other than into Jon’s eyes and the open, sincere warmth living there.

“I’m not the person you remember,” Martin says stiffly.

“Neither am I,” Jon replies, his voice softer than Martin has ever heard it.

Martin’s throat works as he swallows hard.

“I’m not the person you fell in love with.”

Jon’s expression softens and he gives Martin a beseeching look.

“I disagree,” he says, with more of his earlier assurance.

“I’m not,” Martin insists. “I don’t know what the me of the future was like, but I’m not – I’m not him. Whatever he did to make you fall for him, it’s – it’s not me.”

“Martin, I fell in love with this version of you,” Jon replies, his voice tremulous. “With every version of you.”

Martin just stares. Jon smiles at him: soft, sad, sorry, sincere.

“I – I know it’s difficult to believe. I treated you – horribly, and for so long. Took you for granted. Never gave you the respect or care you deserved. I… I don’t think I’ll ever stop being sorry for that.” He maintains eye contact, and Martin once again finds that he cannot look away. “I’ve never been… good at this sort of thing – putting words to how I feel. In retrospect, I was falling for you even before the Unknowing. I just – didn’t realize how much until I woke up and you weren’t there. There was a – an empty space where you used to be, and I couldn’t… I was almost too late. I almost lost you –”

His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows. Martin is startled to see the sheen to his eyes.

“I… I did lose you, eventually, and it nearly…” His voice is rough with held back tears. He clears his throat, and when he speaks again, there’s an intensity to his voice that Martin just now realizes he’s missed. “But not – not until much later. Not here. Not now. Not to Peter fucking Lukas.”

Martin lets out an amused huff at the venom with which Jon says the name. Jon looks up, tilting his head slightly – and Martin can feel one corner of his mouth turning up ever so slightly at the familiar mannerism.

“Sorry,” he says. “Just – don’t hear you swear much.”

“Well, he deserves it,” Jon replies, half-scathing, half-embarrassed.

“Can’t say I disagree with you there,” Martin says with a tired chuckle.

“About – about Peter.” Once again, the name sounds poisonous on Jon’s tongue. “He’s lying to you –”

A bolt of annoyance shoots through Martin at that.

“I’m not an idiot, Jon.”

“No,” Jon says hurriedly, his hands fluttering in agitation, “I didn’t mean to imply –” He breathes a heavy sigh, flustered. “I know that I – I underestimated you for far too long. But you’re clever, and capable, and you understand people in a way that I find endlessly impressive.” To his chagrin, Martin can feel himself redden at the unexpected praise. “You’re not gullible enough to trust Peter for a moment. I know that. And” – Jon grins at him with such open affection that Martin wants to flee – “last time, you outmaneuvered him so seamlessly that I – after seeing the look on Peter’s face, I think I fell a little more in love with you, impossible as it seemed.”

Martin’s face is on fire now, must be.

“I trusted you then, wholeheartedly, and I still do,” Jon continues. “I… I’ll respect whatever decision you make going forward. Even if it means you continue working with Peter. But,” he adds, licking his lips nervously, “I have information now that we didn’t have the first time around, and I – I’d like you to know the whole story. It could have implications for whatever strategy you decide on.”

“You’re talking about the Extinction.”

“Among other things, yes.”

“Is it a real thing?”

Jon lets out a long exhale, looking off to the side with a pensive scowl. Martin can feel himself smile at the sight of that oh-so-familiar crease between his eyebrows, a telltale harbinger of a Jonathan Sims dissertation. Resting his chin in his hands and leaning forward, Martin settles in for an earful.

“Yes,” Jon says after a moment’s hesitation, “but – it’s more complicated than Peter assumes. It’s real insofar as it’s a pervasive terror for large swathes of the human population. Justifiably so, I think it’s fair to say. And it’s possible that, given existential threats like global climate change, nuclear weaponry proliferation, pandemics, war, artificial scarcity, structural oppression and inequality embedded in society worldwide…”

He counts off on his fingers, the line between his eyebrows deepening as he builds momentum.

“And of course we have a twenty-four-hour news cycle inundating us all with that reality, and – entire genres of literature and film utilizing those apocalyptic themes… well, suffice it to say, the fear of a world without us might eventually reach a point where it could be considered on par with Smirke’s Fourteen.

“But Smirke’s taxonomy is also an oversimplification. The human experience is far too varied and complex to be split into neat categories. The animal experience, rather. It’s likely that the Fears have existed since before the advent of modern Homo sapiens, and if we consider the origins of the Flesh – it would be anthropocentric to assume that only the human mind is subject to them, and” – Jon shakes his head – “I'm veering off topic. Point is, the Fears bleed into one another. It’s why a Ritual for a single power was never going to work, why Jonah – Elias’ Ritual was predicated on bringing through all Fourteen at once. Or, case in point, perhaps Fifteen. The Extinction did have a domain of its own after the change, it was just… less sprawling than the others, and there were fewer instances of it. And no Avatars dedicated to it, as far as I could tell.”

Jon taps two fingers against his lips, leg bouncing restlessly as he ponders his next words.

“As for an Emergence, though… I really don’t think there is such a thing as a grand birthing event. The Extinction is already here, in a way. Many of the statements feature more than one Fear at a time, precisely because the boundaries between them are so indistinct. Some of the statements that Adelard Dekker collected – I do think that they contain genuine examples of the Extinction as a coherent Fear of its own, just… mixed in with other Fears. I imagine the Extinction’s trajectory might be similar to that of the Flesh – arising as times change, as more and more minds collectively experience that flavor of fear.

“It might be a quick evolution – similar to how anthropogenic climate change has followed an exponential growth curve, aptly enough – but I don’t think that the Extinction is or – or will be somehow more formidable than the other Fourteen.” His speech turns rapid-fire as he bounces from one thought to the next. “It can’t exist independently of the other Fourteen any more than the others can, so a Ritual on its behalf would collapse under its own weight. If there is a grand extinction event – well, when, I suppose; nothing lasts forever, the End claims everything eventually, time continues its slow crawl towards the inevitable heat death of the universe, et cetera –”

Jon is counting off on his fingers again. Martin shakes his head fondly.

“But it won't occur because of an Extinction Ritual,” Jon goes on. “There was an apocalypse where I came from, and it had nothing to do with the Extinction. Just… a very human flavor of monstrosity: the pursuit of power and personal gain, even at the cost of unimaginable suffering for everyone else.” He gives a humorless laugh. “Fittingly enough, though, it all started from a place of fear – of mortality, of subjugation, of the unknown.” Jon’s expression falls, and his voice drops to a near whisper. “And – and my own fear led me to the eye of that storm, so to speak. All of it can be traced back to that foundational fear of the unknown, can't it? The roots just… branch outward from there.”

Jon’s already trembling hands twitch abruptly, as if snapping something in two. He doesn’t appear to notice the gesture, too lost in his own thoughts. Before Martin can voice his concern at the shift in demeanor, Jon shakes his head and forges onward. He reverts to his previous hyperfocused, almost academic manner, but an undercurrent of anxious energy lingers.

“Anyway, I actually suspect that, much like the End, the Extinction wouldn’t benefit from a Ritual even if one could work. It thrives on the potentiality of a mass extinction event, not the fulfillment of one. The Fears will cease to exist when there are no longer minds to fear them. Of course, it doesn’t have to be humans, or any creature currently living. If something does come after us, the Fears will likely survive and adapt, but otherwise –”

Jon finally makes eye contact with Martin for the first time in minutes and stops short.

“Oh,” he says, sounding mortified, “I’ve been… rambling, haven’t I.”

“I don’t mind,” Martin replies, unable to fight back a smile.

“W-well, anyway…” Jon rubs the back of his neck, looking thoroughly embarrassed. “I don’t believe that the Extinction is the world-ending threat that Peter claims, so if you were planning on continuing to work with him because of that…” He shrugs. “Also, his plan for you was never about the Extinction. Not really. He was – is – genuinely worried about the Extinction, but his plan to stop it is to have the Forsaken destroy the world first. But it hasn’t been long since his last Ritual failed; he knows it will be some time before he can try again. His immediate plan is all about one-upping Elias, taking control of the Panopticon, and accruing power in order to increase the chances of success for his next Ritual attempt.”

Jon exhales another humorless laugh, and his voice takes on an odd, breathless quality as he continues.

“Not all that different from Jonah Magnus, really. His allegiance to the Eye began when he realized that his peers would continue attempting their own Rituals. His solution was to destroy the world before they could. So afraid of his own mortality that he was willing to subjugate the entire human population for his own benefit.” Jon folds his arms again, tucking them against his middle and leaning forward, as if trying to make himself smaller. When he speaks again, there’s a noticeable waver in his voice. “Somewhere along the line, he went beyond justifying his actions – jumped right to taking pleasure in them.”

Jon’s sharp eyes go unfocused. The rise and fall of his chest quickens.

“I’m sorry,” Martin says gently. He doesn’t know what else he can say.

“For what?” Jon asks, coming back to himself after an overlong pause.

“Georgie told me what he did to you. I mean, she didn’t go into detail, but she mentioned that he possessed you and used you to –”

“It wasn’t possession,” Jon interrupts, a desperate edge to his tone. “Not in the conventional horror movie sense. It was the same compulsion that takes me when I start reading any statement, just – more intense. I couldn’t – couldn’t control my body, but he wasn’t actually in my head, it just – felt like it, like he’d crawled into my skin along with his words. Then again, I –” Jon laughs, gripping one wrist with his other hand, fingernails digging grooves into scarred skin. “I suppose I was possessed in a way, in the sense of being someone else’s possession. Have been for a long time – haven’t belonged to myself since the moment he chose me, still don’t –”

Jon’s gaze goes distant yet again, and Martin watches with burgeoning worry as his pupils dilate and constrict with the fluctuation of his voice.

“…he posited a future where – humanity was violently and utterly supplanted –”

“– marked me as a part of that, without my understanding. Or consent –”

“Jon?” Martin says, apprehensive.

“– keep me in the dark just so I wouldn’t stop being useful – made me complicit in a thousand different nightmares, and lives ruined for the sick joy of some otherworldly voyeur –”

“– any future I might have had, sacrificed to his –”

“Jon, what’s –?”

There’s a singsong tenor to his voice and an intensity to his eyes now, reminiscent of the look he gets when he records –

Oh, Martin realizes. Statements.

“– I swear I could still feel those – eyes follow me – a grin of victory playing upon his lips –”

“Jon,” Martin says again, more insistently, reaching out on impulse to place a hand on Jon’s knee.

Cognizance flares to life in Jon’s eyes and his hands fly up to cover his mouth. He seems to struggle with himself for a minute, stolen words muffled beneath the hands pressed tight to his lips. He makes a noise that sounds almost like choking, or sobbing; he looks at Martin with wide, watery eyes, then takes a deep breath in. A quiet whimper chases the air out on his exhale, and Martin’s own breath catches in his throat. He’s seen Jon scared, but he’s never heard him make a sound quite like that – not while bleeding out from a fresh stab wound, not with a gash in his neck, not fumbling to apply ointment to a burned and peeling hand, not even with worms burrowing through his flesh and a corkscrew tearing through the tunnels they left behind.

“You’re okay,” Martin says, willing it to be true.

“I don’t – I don’t want to talk about him anymore,” Jon says abruptly, sharply. He winces and shoots Martin an apologetic look. “Sorry, that was – I didn’t mean to sound cross, I just –” He flaps his hands, lips moving wordlessly.

“It’s okay, I understand.”

Jon nods, but his breaths are still coming fast and shallow. One hand seeks out Martin’s, still resting on his knee; he grips it tight, fingers slotting between Martin’s like they belong there. The direct skin-to-skin contact sends pins and needles radiating up Martin’s arm, but he fights the impulse to draw back.

“We can talk about something else,” Martin says, forcing calm into his voice.

Jon inclines his head again, gulping down air. Even as his breathing begins to even out, the shivers coursing through him only grow more violent, the tremor in his hands becoming more and more pronounced.

“You need to eat something,” Martin says.

“N-no, I –”

“Yes, you do –”

“No!” The exclamation cracks like a whip and ricochets off the walls, echoing down the tunnel. Jon’s face crumples and he shrinks in on himself again. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to shout, I –”

“It’s fine –”

“It’s not.”

“We can argue about it when you’re not literally starving. I’ll go fetch a statement, and –”

“It won’t help.”

“What do you mean?”

Jon brings his free hand to his mouth and bites down on his knuckles.

“Jon?” Martin says again, more sternly. “What did you mean?”

“I’m – not just the Archivist, Martin, I’m the Archive. All of the statements stored upstairs, I already have them, every single one of them catalogued in my head, and – re-experiencing them takes the edge off while I’m reading, but as soon as the recording stops, the hunger comes back even stronger, and I want…” Jon gives him a pained look. “Did Georgie tell you about…?”

“She mentioned something about you putting yourself under house arrest because you’re afraid of hurting people.”

“It’s necessary,” Jon says, almost defensively.

“What will happen if you don’t take in new statements?” Jon says nothing, and Martin sighs. “Jon.”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you starve?”

“I don’t know.”

“Please don’t lie to me.”

“I don’t know,” Jon says, pulling his hand away from Martin’s and rubbing his eyes furiously. “It feels like starving, but I don’t know if it will actually kill me. But I don’t want to hurt people just to keep myself from hurting. I don’t want to be like –” He cuts himself off with a sharp intake of breath. “I’ve caused untold suffering as it is. I don’t want to hurt anyone else.”

“There was a woman giving a statement upstairs earlier –”

“I’m not taking her statement.” Jon’s reply is automatic, almost like a practiced line. It sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself more than Martin.

“I wasn’t suggesting –”

“Her name is Tricia Mallory,” Jon interjects. “It’s her birthday next week; she’ll be twenty-eight. She has two cats, and a parakeet, and a girlfriend named Shona, who has an engagement ring hidden in the bottom left drawer of her desk –”

“Why are you –”

“Because I’m so far removed from humanity at this point that I need to actively, continuously persuade myself not to see other people as cuts of meat.” Martin would have preferred snappish to the resigned, matter-of-fact, tired tone in which Jon gives that confession. “Her name is Tricia Mallory,” he recites again, in that same rehearsed manner. “She lost her voice in a minotaur’s labyrinth. She’s finding it again, slowly, but it will never be the same. Her nightmares are horrific enough without adding another monster to the mix. I’m not taking her statement.”

“What about just reading her written statement?” Martin asks. Jon blinks, slow and catlike, and Martin can see the uncanny glint of hunger in his eyes. “Have you already heard her story?”

“No,” Jon says after a sluggish pause. “I don’t think her statement ever made it down to the Archives the last time. And the knowledge of its content didn’t consciously come to me after the change. There were – so many other statements in progress by then. So much to See.”

“So it would be something new for you.” Jon is silent, staring off into the middle distance, unblinking, glassy eyes riveted on something only he can see. “Would that be enough to hold you over for now? It – it won’t be live and in person, but at least it won’t be… I don’t know, stale?”

“I…” Jon’s pupils dilate. Constrict. Dilate.

“She’s probably left by now,” Martin continues insistently. “I can go track down the statement and bring it back here.” Jon looks as if he’s warring with himself. “Please, Jon. It’s just a reading. You won’t hurt anyone.”

Blood wells up on Jon’s lip where he’s been biting it. Eventually, he gives a tiny nod, his shoulders going limp as if in defeat. Jon needs to eat, but Martin wishes it didn’t feel so much like pressuring someone to break sobriety.

“Okay,” Martin says, fighting back the surge of guilt, “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Please don’t go anywhere, alright?”

“Alright,” Jon replies in a nearly inaudible whisper.

Martin tosses a glance over his shoulder as he leaves. Jon is eerily still again but for the persistent shaking. He looks small, and haunted, and lost; fragile, precarious, with a posture that brings to mind something broken and taped back together in slapdash fashion.

First things first, Martin tells himself, and tries to focus on the task at hand.

Once the trapdoor closes behind Martin, Jon buries his face in his hands.

That wasn’t how he wanted this conversation to go. Just judging from his demeanor, Martin has shaken off the Lonely more than Jon had expected, but still, Jon should be the one comforting him. It took the Martin of the future ages to acclimate to the idea that he deserved to be cared for, too; to unlearn the reflex to reverse any attempt Jon made to take care of him for once. Right now, Martin needs to be shown that care, and yet Jon can’t manage to redirect his one-track mind away from his hunger for more than five minutes at a time. Selfish, selfish, selfish –

The slow creak of a door cuts through the silence, and Jon’s blood runs cold when Helen’s playful lilt rings out behind him.

“Archivist,” she says with unrestrained glee. “Long time no see.”

Jon had been dreading the Distortion’s inevitable reappearance. He should have known that she would make her entrance when he’s at his most vulnerable. Like a shark to blood, he thinks to himself, swallowing around the lump in his throat.

“Brooding, are we?”

“Hi, Helen,” he manages, struggling to stay impassive.

It doesn’t matter; he jumps anyway, when several long fingers – too many angles; too many joints – curl around his shoulder. As if her touch was an unpaid toll, she removes her hand once he provides payment in the form of that momentary burst of alarm. Her headache-inducing laugh is made all the worse by the acoustics of the tunnel.

“Now, then” – Jon doesn’t look around at her, but he can practically hear her lips curl in a grin – “pleasantries aside, I believe we’re due for a chat.”

End Notes:

Citations for Jon’s Archive-speak: MAG 010; 134/111; 154/144; 098. And Arthur Nolan’s statement is from MAG 145.

I’m hoping Jon’s ramble wasn’t Too Much lmao,,, it is admittedly part self-indulgence (read: shameless projection) on my part, but also: ADHD is just Like That sometimes. I’m still navigating how to strike a balance between having something like that flow well and be, well, readable from an audience perspective, while also trying to capture the reality of how an ADHD ramble often does lack coherence from an external POV, because so much of the associative reasoning never gets verbalized (Thought Train Goes Brrr from Point A to Point Q and Does Not Show Its Work). All this is to say: I know that whole section is meta-heavy NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL TANGENTS. I don’t know if I achieved what I was aiming for, but it was fun practice. Hopefully the end result wasn’t too disjointed or too much of a slog. (I actually edited a lot out, believe it or not, lol.)

Also, in Jon's defense, he Really Needs A Snickers. And he hasn't been able to SPEAK FOR HIMSELF for months. He deserves a little infodumping, as a treat.

Thanks for sticking with me through the slower update schedule. We're back to full shifts at work now, so chapters are taking me longer to write. And apparently I've just decided all the chapters are gonna be 10k+ words now, whoops.

#tma #the magnus archives #tma fic

51 notes · View notes

mental-health-advice · 7 years

Text

Submission from KAC

Cw: death, grief, nightmares, suicide

So my grandmother passed away in march and I have been devastated. The grief process has been a huge struggle. Recently, I had a dream that my grandma was in. Not all of it is clear but I do remember it felt very real, I could hear her, see her etc. In this dream, she said “join me” which dream me knew meant in death. My partner woke me up and I had a panic attack. My first suicidal thoughts came as a child so they are always sort of there but I haven’t considered myself actively suicidal (intending, planning etc) for several years and I still don’t, but I cannot get her saying that out of my head and it’s really difficult to cope with. I just feel lost and don’t know what to do.

Hi darling,

I’m so sorry for your loss lovely! I can completely understand how difficult this is to deal with, because I’ve struggled with something similar. My best friend died five years ago, and ever since then I’ve experienced strong thoughts of wanting to join her, at some point causing suicidal ideation to spiral out of control. I’ve also had dreams about her, and waking up from those dreams isn’t something I ever want to experience again because of how difficult it was. I’m telling you this, because I want you to know that you aren’t alone. I understand. Suicidal ideation fuelled by loss of a loved one is incredibly difficult, but you’re not alone ❤

Something that I try to keep in mind is that my friend wouldn’t want me to join her now. She’d want me to live my life and join her when I’m an old wrinkly lady and have lived a great life. The same goes for your grandmother. She’d want you to keep on living, to keep on fighting, and join her when you’ve lived a long and happy life. Not now. Keeping this in mind doesn’t always help but sometimes it does, and I think I’m happy with anything that slightly helps, even if it’s only sometimes.

Lovely, you’re allowed to feel lost. You’re allowed to have a difficult time coping with it. It’s only been a couple months since she passed away. It’s still ‘the first year since’. Often it’s said that this first year is the most difficult, and that after that you slowly start to heal. But in this first year, there are all these ‘first time without’-moments. First birthday, first Christmas, etc. All of these annual events that she’d normally join, or you’d call or be in touch in another way, and now that’s missing. That hurts, it really does. So it’s okay to be upset, to be in pain- it’s understandable. But it does need to be manageable, it shouldn’t pull you under.

During this first year (or anytime really), it can be really helpful to write letters. Write to your grandma about these experiences. Write about how it used to be when she were there. Write about how it was this time. Write about the things that were different, how she would have enjoyed them or hated them. Write about what you thought of them. Spill your heart out to her. By doing this, you’re still sharing all of these events with her in a way. It’s different than her actually being there, but it’s the closest you can get right now. In a way, writing about it all is a reminder that she wasn’t there and that hurts, but I don’t think it’s something you’d forget anyway, and in that case it’s good to write and let out your emotions.

I also struggled a lot with the fact that I never got to say goodbye. My biggest passion is ballet, and I’m really close with my ballet group and teacher, so they knew how much I struggled with that. During one performance, my teacher gave me a dance in which I could say goodbye. A little girl was a little angel in that dance, and it had a lot of emotion. Doing that really helped me a lot. Of course you most likely won’t do the same thing, but maybe something similar in a sense that it’s a big thing that allows you to say goodbye? If this is something you struggle with of course, I don’t know if that’s the case for you.

When dreams feel so real, it’s so difficult to not consider them real. But lovely, it was a dream. Dreams can come through from parts of our brain. Since you’ve been struggling with your grandmother’s death, it’s understandable that you dreamed about her! And since you’ve been struggling with suicidal ideation for a long time as well, your brain could have fuelled this bit into the dream as well, resulting in your grandmother telling you to join you. But that wasn’t really your grandmother lovely, that was your brain mixing two topics together. Maybe it helps to try and keep this in mind. Because really, your grandmother wouldn’t want you to die. She cares about you and she’d want you to live.

Lovely, can you please reach out to someone? Talking to a professional has been really helpful for me. I found that talking to someone whom I wasn’t close to allowed me to open up about things I wouldn’t say to anyone else. I could discuss suicidal ideation more freely, because it’s less of a taboo and scary subject among professionals. My therapist understood that I experience suicidal ideation but that I could keep myself from acting on it, whereas friends for example wouldn’t have understood that. At other times when I didn’t feel like I could keep myself from acting on it, my therapist could take the necessary actions to keep me safe. In therapy I learned more tools to keep myself safe, and I think you could benefit a lot from that as well.

One tool I’d like to share with you is a ‘Crisis Prevention Action Plan’ (CPAP). In this plan there are 5 stages. Stage 0 is where you’re feeling relatively okay. Stage 4 is crisis, when you don’t feel like you can keep yourself safe. For each stage you describe the following things:

Symptoms that you can recognise yourself;

Symptoms that people close to you can recognise;

Things that you can do yourself;

Things that people close to you can do.

When I say ‘things that you/people close to you can do’ I mean things that can prevent you from going a stage higher (more towards crisis), or things that can help you to go a stage lower (more towards relatively okay). For example, in stage 4 I’ve listed under ‘things that people close to me can do’ to not leave me alone, no matter how much I want to be alone. When feeling in your CPAP, it’s usually easiest to start with stage 0 and stage 4, as these are the extremes and therefore have the most easily recognisable symptoms. After filling in the symptoms for those stages, you can try to fill in stage 2, as this is kind of the middle ground between these two extremes. Then you can fill in stage 1 and 3, by slightly reducing/increasing the symptoms from stage 2, but not as little/much as in stage 0 and 4. After having done all of this, you can fill in the things that you can do for each stage. What’s important to keep in mind is that you can put one thing at all stages! I have watching Netflix listed at almost all of my stages, except for stage 0. But the reason you write down these things to do separately for each stage is because when you’re in crisis you might for example not have the rest to read a book, whereas in stage 0 or stage 1 this is really helpful for you. It’s also helpful in the way that you can look at your CPAP, evaluate in which stage you’re in, and can read from there what can then maybe helpful, rather than having to think of it all yourself. To make the most out of your CPAP, it can be good to share it with some people close to you, so that they can pick up on warning signs that you’re falling back and can help you get out of those negative swings.

Last of all, I strongly recommend you to talk to those close to you. I didn’t do that, because I thought everyone had already moved on, and I didn’t want to remind them of what happened and cause them pain. It turned out they’d have loved to talk more about it, but they thought it was too painful for me, so they didn’t. No matter what, they will be okay with talking about it, especially if it helps you. Sharing memories, talking about what it would be like if she was still there, talking about how much you miss her and are hurting, all is okay. You don’t have to carry this weight alone.

I’ve written a grief page, so I’m going to link you to that. Maybe there are some tips on there that can be helpful for you. You can find it here. I want you to know that I’m here for you. Everyone’s grieving process is different, but since I’ve had quite a rocky one too, I think I understand at least part of what you’re dealing with, and I really want to help you. You can always send in a message here at MHA addressed to me, and I’ll try to answer it as soon as I can. I hope that this was at least a little bit helpful!

Sometimes what seems impossible, is just hard.

Keep fighting beautiful ❤

Love Pauline

#KAC #mental health #advice #advice blog #grief #death #death of a loved one #loss #loss of a loved one #suicide #suicidal ideation #suicidal thoughts #nightmares #dreams #mhapauline

2 notes · View notes

holisticknight · 7 years

Text

cw: suicidal ideation, defeatism (i think?), general awkwardness

Hanging out with people shouldn’t make me suicidal, but it does. I hang out with them and I think, is this all there is? I hang out and I think, is there nothing else? I miss my discussions of philosophy, I miss tearing apart the universe and putting it back together, I miss whispering about who would play what role if the situation was slanted differently, I miss speculation, I miss talking, I miss life, I miss living. The world is beautiful, none of them see it, and I miss knowing someone who did. I don’t know who to talk to, or who to turn to. I don’t know how much of myself to give to anyone, and it feels an awful lot like nobody wants any part of this, anyway. Why am I here, why, this life is so boring now. It’s so empty and lonely. People still sparkle but none of that sparkle is for me. The world still shines but it doesn’t shine for me. What good is enjoying the beauty of existence if you don’t have anyone else who appreciates the view? I don’t want this all to myself. I want someone to give this to, someone to share it with. I want to watch delight light up their face, want to see the whole world bright and shining in someone else’s eyes. (It’s prettier that way, anyhow.) Once, the smile that lit up my moment also carried all my hopes for the future. It illuminated my whole life, every ounce of pain I’ve ever experienced, every fading scar every tragic moment, and it made it all radiant, made it worth it because that smile was delivered to me to someone who kissed my scars and called them beautiful, who held my face in their hands and called it good, who saw the length and breadth of my soul not just the goodness but the badness too, all the crevices and cracks and crags that tear apart the surface of the person that I am, all the glimmering insubstantial nightmares, they saw all of it, all my dreams and fears and falsehoods, they saw me and called me real and i was shining, just like the world, just like their smile, i was shining and and And now it’s dull and dark, and I’m still here. Everything is a reminder that once the world was bright and full of promise. Once, I was alive. Once, I was living. i am alone in my room, without their voice in my pocket, and everything is dim. This is all there is. The world is beautiful, and I can’t remember why that matters from here, and there is nothing else. The world is beautiful, and because I am alone in it the glory of existence is a weight on my shoulders bearing me down. The world is beautiful and all I want is to kiss it goodbye.

#my words #suicidal ideation #poetry #blah blah blah #i'm safe for the record #i am always safe #i might sometimes say it with a bitter smile #but i am always safe

2 notes · View notes

bubonickitten · 4 years

Link

Summary: Jon goes back to before the world ended and tries to forge a different path.

Previous chapter: AO3 // tumblr

Chapter 17 full text & content warnings below the cut.

CWs for Chapter 17: panic/anxiety symptoms; brief mention of past self-harm (from last chapter); mention of past (canonical) blood/injury; brief allusion to past passive suicidal ideation; brief claustrophobia/Buried themes (in the context of a nightmare); some blink-and-you'll-miss-it internalized ableism re: ADHD (not explicitly stated as such); Jon-typical self-loathing, internalized victim blaming/dehumanization, etc.; discussion of low self-worth, fear of abandonment/rejection, and other Lonely themes; extensive discussion of Jon's statement consumption (so, general warning for restrictive behaviors re: 'eating' and self-hate re: addiction/compulsions); swears. SPOILERS through Season 5.

Chapter 17: Intervention

Even asleep, Jon is a flurry of movement. The muscles in his jaw tense repeatedly as he grinds his teeth; his limbs twitch and jerk and tremble; his fingers curl into his palms, fists clenching and relaxing at random intervals. The quick, erratic motions beneath his closed eyelids are accompanied by gasps and the occasional whimper. Impossibly, he looks even frailer than usual – folded in on himself and shivering despite the thick, oversized jumper engulfing his slight frame.

Martin sits on the floor with his side pressed up against the cot, his arm resting on top of it and his eyes riveted on the few inches of space between Jon and himself. Part of him wants to reach out, to soothe away the varying shades of distress flitting their way across Jon’s face; another part of him, quieter but nonetheless insistent on making its existence known, tugs him in the opposite direction, urging him to widen that handspan of distance between them into a chasm. Something about Jon’s ragged breathing keeps Martin rooted in place, his heart skipping a beat any time the pauses between breaths stretch just a little too long for comfort.

At least he’s breathing at all, Martin thinks with a pang. His hand twitches in an unconscious desire to check for a pulse – some secondary sign to reassure him that Jon really is just sleeping.

At the gentle knock-knock on the doorframe, Martin jumps. The door to Document Storage, already cracked an inch or so, creaks as it swings wider.

“Jon?” Georgie calls softly, peeking through the gap. “You in here? I was just – oh,” she says when she sees Martin. An instant later she notices Jon, tossing and turning on the cot behind him. “What happened? Is he okay?”

“He… well, he’s fine now. I think. Just… sleeping.”

“Wait,” she says, fully entering the room and approaching to watch Jon with genuine astonishment, “you actually got him to sleep?”

“Not really? He was having trouble staying vertical, so I told him he should lie down until the vertigo passed, and…” Martin shrugs. He’s still taken aback by the fact that Jon complied without argument. “I don’t think he was planning on falling asleep, but he was out as soon as his head hit the pillow.” Jon’s fingers spasm, brow wrinkling as he cringes and curls into a tighter ball. Martin sighs. “Doesn’t look very restful, though.”

“Oh, he’s always been a fitful sleeper. Even back in uni. He didn’t used to be that bad, though. Or – he was, but in short bursts. Not… drawn out like this. He’d usually wake himself up after a minute or so of…” She frowns as Jon goes taut in a full-body spasm. “That.”

“I guess the Eye doesn’t want the dream to end,” Martin says quietly. Jon twists his fingers against the sheets, gathering the fabric in a death grip. Martin’s hand twitches again, inching just a bit closer to Jon’s. He resists the urge to uncurl Jon’s fingers, to give him a hand to hold instead.

“Last I checked, the nightmares weren’t as nightmarish anymore,” Georgie says. “I mean, by his own admission, he treated mine and Naomi’s dreams like social calls.”

Martin tears his eyes away from Jon to glance at Georgie, a puzzled expression on his face. “Naomi?”

“Naomi Herne. He said hers was the first statement he took in person.”

“Yeah, back when he was still putting on the skeptic act. And she filed a complaint against him for being…” Martin smiles and shakes his head. “Well, Jon.”

“I’m not surprised,” Georgie says with an amused snort. “They seem pretty friendly now, though.”

“What, seriously?”

“Yeah. They do have a similar sense of humor. She doesn’t seem to scare easy, which probably helps. And she has a cat, so…”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Jon… has trouble initiating when it comes to having a social life,” Georgie says slowly. “Just wanting to talk doesn’t strike him as a good enough reason to start a conversation. He worries he’ll just be an annoyance. It’s like he needs to come up with some concrete justification for reaching out. But Naomi is always excited to talk about the Duchess – that’s her cat – which means Jon is less likely to feel like he’s bothering her. Which also makes him less likely to talk himself out of sending a text. Plus, it’s a safe, normal thing to talk about, and he loves cats, so…” She shrugs. “It’s good for him.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. Gives her an excuse to stay in touch, too, I think.” Georgie gives Martin a significant look. “Lonely, you know?”

“I…” Martin rubs the back of his neck, not meeting her eye. “Yeah.”

“Anyway, I thought… well, he said the nightmares weren’t as bad as they used to be.” Georgie frowns as she watches Jon’s lips twist, his teeth bared as he sucks in a sharp breath. “I don’t know. At least he’s actually sleeping. I don’t think he’s slept for more than forty minutes at a time since he got out of the hospital.”

“That was nearly a month ago.” Martin gapes at her, horrified. “How has he even been able to function with that level of sleep deprivation?”

“The same way he survived for six months without a heartbeat. And why he has to consciously remind himself to breathe sometimes, and has a tendency to forget to blink, and doesn’t have much of an appetite for normal food anymore. He’s not fully human –”

Georgie must sense Martin preparing to go on the offensive, because she holds up both hands palms-out, placating.

“I’m not saying that he’s inhuman, either. He might be convinced that he’s more monster than human, but he’s still a person. He’s just… different now, and he’s resigned to that, but he hasn’t yet gotten it through his head that there are people who will accept him regardless.” She sighs. “My original point was that he doesn’t have the same physiological needs that most people do. But he still does need to sleep from time to time. Sleep deprivation clearly takes a toll on him.”

“Figures,” Martin huffs, blowing hair out of his eyes. “He’s always treated sleep as optional.”

“Yeah,” Georgie says with a laugh. “He’s operated on a bare minimum of sleep for as long as I’ve known him. Part casual self-neglect, part allergy to the general concept of resting, and part legitimate insomnia. I told him more than once he should get evaluated for a sleep disorder, but… well, you know Jon. And now that he really does need less sleep than the average person, of course he’s pushing the limits even further.”

Martin looks down at Jon and thinks, as he has countless times before: He really does make it so damn difficult to take care of him.

It’s simultaneously heartbreaking and frustrating, even irritating at times – but somehow, whenever Jon doubles down, it only makes Martin do the same. It’s become such a familiar dance, a challenge even, and more often than not, Martin wins those contests of will: badger Jon persistently enough, strike just the right balance between expressing worry and wagging a finger, and eventually he’ll agree to take care of himself. In the beginning, he would grump and roll his eyes and drag his feet; as time went on, though, he became more receptive to it. Some days, he even seemed to enjoy – albeit in a guarded, almost shy way – being cajoled into sharing lunch or tea or conversation.

Unthinkingly, Martin brushes a lock of hair away from Jon’s forehead, damp with cold sweat. Wishes he could smooth the tension away as easily.

“Did you two talk about things?” Georgie asks.

“Some of it.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“I…” Martin bites his lip. “I feel like I shouldn’t want to, but I – I sort of do?”

“Well. I have some time to listen.” Georgie takes a seat towards the foot of the cot. “How’d it go? Bearing in mind this isn’t the tunnels.”

“It’s… a lot.”

“Mm. I can imagine.”

“I mean, he…” Martin runs a hand through his hair with a disbelieving, nervous chuckle. “He told me he wants to grow old with me?”

“He said that?” Georgie laughs outright. “God, he’s gotten even more saccharine than I thought.”

“It’s just – not something I would have ever imagined him saying? To anyone, let alone me.” Martin can feel his palms sweating now; he rubs them on his trousers, hoping to dispel some of the clamminess. “He just seems so… changed.”

“He is, but… maybe not as drastically as it might seem. Rather, this is him, just – without all the walls.” Georgie chuckles, shaking her head. “And less of a filter, apparently. Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Martin repeats, perplexed.

“He’s dumping a lot on you all at once. I can talk to him, if you want. Tell him to slow down, give you some space to process it all.”

“I… I don’t…” Martin pauses, coming up against an invisible wall between a daunting realization and the explicit acknowledgment thereof. He makes several abortive attempts at speech before he manages to voice the confession: “I don’t think I want him to?”

Left to himself for too long, Martin can feel himself start to come unmoored. The truth the Lonely is so loathe to have him accept, let alone speak aloud, is this: he doesn’t want that to happen. Not anymore. Being in the presence of others, actively taking part in a conversation, seeking comfort in touch – all of these things still feel grating, unnatural even, but a return to solitude frightens him in a way it hasn’t for months. It’s an old terror, one that he had become numb to since accepting the Lonely’s embrace. Now, it seems to have returned with a vengeance. The lingering, ambient discomfort that comes with human connection is quickly becoming preferable to that looming fear of absence.

Still, though…

“It feels like – going against my nature, every minute I spend talking to him, to you, to… anyone, really. I think I just… forgot how not to be alone?”

On some level, Martin wonders whether he ever knew in the first place. He’s had friends, certainly, but every relationship, no matter how ostensibly reciprocal, has been laced with an undercurrent of insecurity: a loud, nagging voice in the back of his mind, reminding him of the consequences should he allow himself to be too much or not enough. Always primed for rejection, he strove to make himself pleasant, to make himself useful, to make himself accommodating and unobtrusive and easy. Sometimes, he felt like an impostor, fooling people into believing that he was worth keeping around. He was always counting down the moments until someone would see through the façade to the inadequacy within, realize he wasn’t worth the trouble, and leave him behind.

“The Lonely… I don’t think I want it anymore,” he says, “but it feels – wrong, to leave it behind. Not me, somehow.”

“Hmm.” Georgie drums her fingers against her chin. “I can understand that. Isolation can become so habitual that it starts to feel like home, and anything trying to break through feels like an invasion. You start to feel safer alone, and you deny those moments when you catch yourself wishing things were different, because loneliness has become such a part of you that you don’t know who you would be without it.”

“I… yeah,” Martin says, taken aback by having it laid out so succinctly.

“In my experience, it helps to remind yourself that your brain is lying to you when it tells you you’d be better off alone. In your case, I guess it’s your brain and a supernatural fear god or whatever, but… unless you’re keen to fight a god, it might be best to start with your brain. That’s something you actually can exert some control over, with enough practice. And I think it might make it harder for the fear to get to you if you’re not trapped in the kind of mindset it thrives on.”

“I guess,” Martin says, looking off to the side. Once again, he rests his arm on the cot, his hand mere inches away from Jon’s, sheet still clenched tightly in his fist.

“But you don’t have to take it on all at once,” Georgie says. “If you have to set boundaries, Jon will understand. And even if he didn’t, you still have a right to enforce them. Not to sound cliché, but you shouldn’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm.”

The problem is, of course, that the concept of putting himself first is as alien to Martin as the idea of being… well, not lonely.

“I can hear the cogs turning,” Georgie says with a gentle smile. “Look, it’s easier to accept a concept intellectually than it is to actually apply it to yourself. There’s a learning curve. But it’s a lesson worth learning. Took me way too long to learn it myself. If it helps, start with – to use another cliché – ‘put your own oxygen mask on before helping others with theirs.’ Then you can move onto practicing self-care without feeling guilty.”

“What are you, a therapist?”

“Nope. I’ve just had several years of experience being on the receiving end.”

“O-oh. Uh, sorry –”

“Don’t be. It’s not something to be ashamed of. Anyway, at this point, I could probably fill out CBT worksheets in my sleep. With enough practice, it does start to become intuitive.” She shrugs. “Anyway, you can’t fix Jon, and I don’t think he expects you to. You can support him, you can care about him, but you can’t make him better. That’s true in any relationship, but… well, obviously it’s – a bit more complicated in this case.”

“I just… I want him to be okay, and I don’t know how to help –” Martin startles when Jon kicks one leg out violently, entangling himself in the sheets as he pulls it back and curls into himself again. Martin lowers his voice. “He – he was so starving he passed out, Georgie, he wasn’t breathing and it was like the hospital all over again and – and I don’t think I have any other stories I can tell that would count as statements –”

“Wait, you gave him a statement?”

“Y-yeah.”

“I thought he didn’t want –”

“I don’t know if he would have agreed if he was conscious, but he… he wasn’t waking up, and I didn’t know what else to do,” Martin says pleadingly, watching Georgie carefully to gauge her reaction. “He needed a fresh statement. Old statements aren’t enough, and he said new ones cause nightmares regardless of whether he takes them in person or not, so we can’t just give him new written statements that come in, and I – I don’t know what we’re going to do if he gets that bad again.”

Martin remembers the look in Jon’s eyes: glossy, glazed and almost luminous with an alien sort of hunger, but shot through with a terror more devastating than Martin had ever seen from him. The unflinching intent with which he hurt himself; the erratic rhythm of his breathing; the way his dilated pupils swallowed the irises just before he fell unconscious. He was lost to the world in those moments, alert but unresponsive, seemingly unable to hear a word Martin was saying.

And the abject horror on his face when he commanded Martin to stay away…

“He was… he was so scared. Of himself. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but he – he can’t think straight when he’s like that.”

“Shit,” Georgie says, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“I think working in the archives gives some immunity? I’ve given a few statements, before we knew how all this works, and he never showed up in my nightmares. Tim’s or Sasha’s, either, as far as I know. And I actually… well, I don’t actually mind giving him statements, to be honest? It’s – hard, to relive it, but it’s… cathartic, too. To get it all out, to be able to actually – describe it in words. Maybe I’d feel differently if I came in off the street – or was approached – and I didn’t know him, and wasn’t protected from the side effects, but – as it is, I would be fine giving him statements when he needs them, and that’s not – that’s not a huge sacrifice on my part, is what I’m saying. But I don’t… I don’t think I have any more stories to give.”

“Okay,” Georgie mutters to herself, rubbing her temples. “Okay. We… we’ll figure something out. Obviously, Jon needs to be part of that conversation. Maybe Daisy, too – Jon seems to trust her.”

“Why would he trust her?” Martin asks, incredulous, almost incensed. “She kidnapped him. She – she slit his throat, she was going to –”

“I know. I don’t really understand it either. But supposedly she’s changed a lot, and she’s an Avatar like he is. I get the feeling he might want her there.”

“Fine,” Martin says in a clipped voice, even though fine seems like a wildly inaccurate descriptor to him. “What about Basira? And Melanie?”

“Melanie… with Jon’s permission, I’ll invite her, just so she’s not out of the loop, but I doubt she’ll take us up on it.” Georgie frowns, rubbing her jaw absently. “As for Basira… I don’t know. Something Jon said…”

“What?”

“I’m…” Georgie pauses, tilting her head from side to side as she deliberates. “Concerned. About how Basira might approach the situation.”

It takes a few seconds for Martin to work out the implication. When he does, he pales, mouth going slack.

“You – you don’t think she’d hurt him?”

“I don’t think so,” Georgie says haltingly, “but there’s a chance she might put the option back on the table if she thinks he’s too dangerous. She wouldn’t like it, but… well, she seems utilitarian. I think she’ll do whatever she thinks she needs to do. And even if she doesn’t threaten him directly, I still…” She sighs. “Jon’s not in a good place right now, mentally. Frankly, I worry about exposing him to anything that might encourage a better-off-dead mindset, even if it’s just… perceived condemnation.”

“God, this…” Martin laughs, high and stressed. “This entire situation is…”

“I know. But we’ll figure something out. And in the meantime, make sure to take care of yourself too, alright?”

“Yeah,” Martin says, only half-listening.

“I mean it. Jon cares about you. He wouldn’t want you to run yourself into the ground on his behalf.”

Before Martin can respond, Jon jumps in his sleep again with a strangled gasp. Flinging one arm out, his hand brushes against Martin and seizes a fistful of his sleeve. Tightening his grip, he tugs on Martin’s arm to bring it closer, practically hugging it in a vice grip. Almost instantly Jon calms, tense muscles relaxing, pained expression going slack, a relieved sigh shuddering out of him as he nuzzles into the crook of Martin’s elbow.

Martin can feel his cheeks burning. He shoots a preemptive glower in Georgie’s direction, daring her to laugh – but she only smiles.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” she says, rising to her feet. “Text me when he’s awake, will you?”

“Y-y-yeah,” Martin stammers. “I’ll – I’ll see you later.”

He barely notices her departure, instead staring down at Jon with a vague sense of wonder. Jon holds fast to him like he’s a lifeline, and Martin can feel him breathing warm and steady through the fabric of his sleeve. The cold sweat on his brow seems to be evaporating now. Martin shifts his position to more fully face the cot. As he reaches up with his free hand to brush away the hair clinging to Jon’s forehead, a slow, shy smile begins to spread across Martin’s face.

It won’t be long before Jon succumbs to another fit of tossing and turning, but in the meantime, Martin simply watches him with faint awe and renewed affection. He’s never seen Jon look so at peace, and he takes the opportunity to memorize the sight.

When another shard of the Lonely shatters and crumbles away, Martin is too preoccupied to note its passing.

With a startled yelp, Jon sits bolt upright. Gulping down air in deep, ragged breaths, he looks wildly around the room, not taking anything in: it’s all visual noise, smudges of loud colors and sinister shadows, all of it closing in and bearing down on him.

Something next to him – close too close too close – moves abruptly, rising up and looming over and settling down beside him. Jon cringes away, only to find that his legs are pinned together by something, restricting his movement, and there’s dirt in his mouth, and dirt in his throat, and dirt in his lungs, and he cannot breathe, cannot breathe, cannot breathe, cannot breathe –

“Jon,” comes a voice – somehow both close and far away. “Listen, you’re – you’re okay, you’re safe.”

Trapped in that liminal twilight haze between sleep and waking, Jon gropes blindly for a handhold, an anchor, something real and solid and –

His hand collides with something soft, warm – wool, his mind supplies, and then:

…wool is able to absorb nearly one-third of its weight in water…

He shakes his head to chase away the stray scrap of trivia, digging his fingers into the fabric to ground himself.

“It was just a dream,” says the voice again – a kind voice, a safe voice – and Jon takes a shuddering breath, like a drowning man clawing for air.

Then a hand closes over his, and that light pressure is enough plunge Jon right back below the surface. He thrashes violently, desperate to break away from the throbbing litany of too close cannot move trapped held pinned in place screeching metal crushing in and down and down and down and Karolina beholds her encroaching fate with tranquil acceptance and the Archivist feels her skull crack and her chest cave in and her lungs collapse and still she smiles and she watches as the Archivist flails uselessly for an escape that does not will not cannot exist and the door bulges and splinters and explodes inward and the deluge rushes in and the Archivist is drowning, drowning, drowning –

The hand draws back, the pressure lifts, the train car finally collapses, and the last remnants of hazy sleep begin to disintegrate.

“S-sorry, I didn’t mean to – it’s – it’s just me, Jon.”

“Martin?” Jon chokes out, tightening his grasp on Martin’s jumper – wool, warm, soft, safe – still bunched in one hand. He reaches out his other arm to find a second handhold.

“Yeah. I – I won’t hurt you.”

Safe.

“I know,” Jon says groggily. The tension drains away and he sags against Martin’s side, breathing in slow, deliberate swallows. “’M sorry. Dream.”

The first time he’s slept, truly slept since leaving the hospital, and of course it had to be while Karolina Górka was dreaming. Of course.

“Do you… want to talk about it?”

“Buried,” Jon mumbles, face partially burrowed in Martin’s shoulder. Self-explanatory, he figures.

“Oh,” Martin says in a broken whisper. Jon opens one eye to see an expression of helpless pity on Martin’s face. “That’s…”

“’S okay,” Jon assures. “I’m okay.”

Reluctantly, he releases his hold on Martin and leans away. When he stretches – partly out of habit, partly to reassure himself that he can – there’s still something pinioning his legs. A spark of panic tears through him before he realizes that it’s just the sheets, tangled hopelessly around his lower half. With some difficulty, he manages to extricate himself and kick the blankets away.

“How long was I out?”

“Couple hours.”

“Have you just been sitting here the whole time?” Jon frowns apologetically. “You could’ve woken me.”

“Wake you when you were actually sleeping for once? Uh, no. How are you feeling?”

“Better,” Jon says simply. “I’d like to know how you’re doing.”

“I’m – fine,” Martin says. Jon raises an eyebrow. “Really, I – I am. I’m more worried about –”

“Me, I know. And I’m worried about you. I… don’t think you’re just ‘fine.’” Martin gives a noncommittal grunt. “I really would like to know where you are in all this. How you’re faring. How I can help.”

Martin remains silent, lips pressed tightly together as if to seal them.

“I know I was – distracted, earlier, but I… I really do want to help,” Jon tries again. “Please let me help?”

Something finally gives and Martin slouches with a sigh.

“I’m… still trying to figure it all out,” he says slowly. “I don’t know what I’m feeling most of the time, besides… worried, and…”

“Lonely.”

“Yeah,” Martin says with a wistful smile.

“You don’t have to be,” Jon says quietly.

“I know.”

“I’m not – I’m not trying to –” Jon sighs. “I just… I need you to know.”

“I know,” Martin says again.

Jon bites back the nagging impulse to ask all the questions itching on his tongue: Have you decided what to do about Peter? How Lonely are you now? Do you need closeness or distance? What should I be doing, or not doing? What can I do to take care of you? Where do we stand?

What do you see, when you look at me?

Jon looks away and shuts his eyes.

“I’m sorry you had to see me like that, by the way. It wasn’t my intention to frighten you. Or to…” He swallows, fighting back the nausea rising in him. “To compel you.”

“It’s alright –”

“It’s not,” Jon says brusquely. He makes a conscious effort to soften his tone before he continues. “I don’t want to be the thing that frightens you.”

“You’re not,” Martin says with a bemused frown. “I know you didn’t mean to use your powers on me.”

“You were afraid. I could…” Jon closes his eyes again and forces himself to say the words. “I could taste it.”

And the Archivist in him savored it.

“I wasn’t afraid of you, Jon. I was afraid for you. You looked terrified, and in pain, and you were hurting yourself, and I didn’t know how to help, and then I didn’t know if you were going to wake up, and… that’s what scared me.” Jon’s skepticism must show on his face, because there’s an intensity to the words when Martin reiterates: “Not you. Never you.”

“Never say never,” Jon says with a brittle, self-deprecating smile.

“I’m serious, Jon.”

So am I.

“I… I think we need to talk about where to go from here,” Martin says after a moment, averting his eyes.

“I agree.”

“You do?” Martin looks back to him, blinking in surprise.

“Yes,” Jon says, adjusting his position to sit cross-legged and pivoting to face Martin fully. “The others need to know what happened. I can’t be trusted not to hurt anyone –”

“No, that’s not what I –” Martin sighs. “I’m worried about what could happen if things get that bad again.”

“That’s what I’m saying. I came dangerously close to – to relapsing. We need some plan in place, some way to keep me contained so that I don’t –”

“Stop, stop, stop,” Martin says, holding up a hand. Jon tilts his head, bewildered. “I’m not – I’m not talking about keeping you contained, Jon. I’m worried about you. This goes beyond a compulsion you can beat with enough willpower. You were starving. You… you could have died.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Exactly! We don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.”

“Well, yes, but –”

“No ‘but.’ There has to be some way to keep you fed without hurting anyone. We just need to –”

“Martin, terror and suffering is the entire point. That’s what sustains it. Mine, my victim’s, doesn’t matter as long as it hurts.” Jon laughs, hollow and bitter. “It’s not like there’s an ethical way to – to harvest trauma –”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Martin says fiercely, “and I’m not ready to just give up. I would hope you aren’t, either.”

“I…” Jon busies himself with tucking a flyaway lock of hair behind his ear, using it as an excuse to break eye contact.

“Please, Jon.”

Martin takes his hand, prompting Jon to look up again. A familiar guilt rises up in him, shame at always being the one to put that expression of desperate worry on Martin’s face.

It’s enough to make him agree, albeit in a whisper, “Okay.”

“Right,” Martin says, giving Jon’s hand a brief squeeze. “Georgie and I were talking while you were asleep. She wants to be part of the discussion, so long as you’re alright with it.”

“Of course. We should probably tell Daisy and Basira as well.”

Martin appears to hesitate.

“I was thinking the three of us can meet first,” he says carefully, “and then we can open up the discussion after.”

“Why?” Jon observes the slight concavity that forms as Martin chews the inside of his cheek. “Martin?”

“Georgie’s worried about Basira’s reaction,” Martin says abruptly, “and honestly, so am I.”

“She needs to know.”

“I – I know, it’s just…”

“We have so few allies; we can’t afford secrecy and mistrust. And…”

And of all of them, Basira is the one Jon can trust to do what must be done if things go wrong. If he goes wrong.

“Basira is a strategist,” he says. “She’s good at viewing a problem from multiple angles, considering all the variables, predicting potential solutions and outcomes and then weighing them with a… pragmatic eye.”

“The pragmatism is what worries me.”

“I want her there,” Jon says simply.

“Okay,” Martin says, but Jon can tell he’s not thrilled about it. “What about Daisy?”

“Yes,” Jon says, not missing a beat. At that, Martin somehow manages to look even less thrilled.

“And Melanie?”

“I… I’m alright with her being there, but I don’t want her to feel pressured. She’s dealing with enough as it is.”

“Okay. I can let everyone know, but I think you should get some more rest before –”

“No.”

“Jon –”

“I need to confront this now. While I’m still… in my right mind,” Jon says, plucking absently at his sleeve with his free hand. “Sober.”

For a brief second, Martin looks ready to argue, but then he capitulates with a sigh.

“Okay,” he says, releasing Jon’s hand and standing up. “I’ll… round everyone up, I suppose.”

“Thank you,” Jon murmurs.

Martin glances back several times as he leaves the room. Jon waits until he’s out of sight before he puts his face in his hands, sighs, and tries to brace himself for a conversation he dreads almost as much as the Coffin.

A short time later, the group – minus Melanie – convenes in the tunnels, five chairs arranged in a loose circle with a sixth left empty off to the side. Sitting almost directly across from Jon, Basira watches him with eyes narrowed, arms folded, and mouth pressed into a firm line.

“What do you mean you ‘almost’ relapsed?”

“Martin suggested reading a new statement that came in earlier this evening,” Jon tells her in a straightforward near-monotone. Pushing through the discomfort it brings, he forces himself to meet her eyes when he speaks. “I agreed, without informing him that reading a fresh written statement has the same repercussions that taking a live statement in person does. I was going to feed, knowing that it would hurt an innocent person.”

“But you didn’t,” Martin says emphatically. “You stopped yourself.”

“Only because Helen pointed out the cognitive dissonance. Took a monster to remind me not to be a monster.” Jon scoffs. “Even then, I almost did it anyway.”

“But you didn’t,” Martin repeats.

“What about next time?” Basira asks, unimpressed. “When you get hungry again, what then?”

“That’s what we’re here to discuss,” Georgie says, assuming the role of mediator the moment she notices Martin’s scowl deepen. “We need to find some way to keep things from getting that bad in the first place.”

Thoroughly unnerved, Jon squirms in his seat. Basira has had him pinned under her stare for several minutes now, and she seems unlikely to cut him free any time soon. But what right does he have to object to scrutiny, given what he is?

“What did you do with the statement?” Basira demands. “The one you were going to read?”

“I… asked Martin to burn it.”

Her eyes flick to Martin. “And did you?”

“N-not yet –”

“Burn it. As soon as we’re done here.” She shifts her attention back to Jon. “Is there an alternative to new statements?”

Jon doesn’t miss a beat when he answers, matter-of-fact: “No.”

“Jon,” Martin and Georgie say simultaneously, with the tenor of a reprimand.

“I’m not – I’m not trying to be difficult,” he replies, finally breaking eye contact with Basira to look down at his hands. “It’s just… reality. I’m an Archive dedicated the curation of statements – of fear.”

“You never actually explained what that means,” Basira says. “You being the Archive.”

“It’s… hard to put into words.”

“Try.”

Jon sighs, taking a moment to collect his thoughts.

“The Archive is more than – paper and files and tapes. The reason it needs to be housed in a living mind rather than a mere building is because the statements themselves have a living quality to them.” He crosses his arms, brow furrowing as he struggles with his phrasing. “They need to be immersed in a steady supply of fear. A shelving unit, a filing cabinet, a hard drive, a cassette tape – those can’t provide the ideal habitat that they need to thrive. The Archivist is –”

“– simply a battery, a ready source of constant terror –”

He cuts the Archive off with a frustrated snarl, digging his fingernails into his arms.

“Hey,” Georgie says gently, “you’re alright. Take your time.”

Jon has to spend a few minutes counting breaths before he feels ready to try again.

“What I was –” He cuts himself off preemptively, half-expecting the Archive to intrude again. Once he realizes the words are his own, he clears his throat to recover from the false start. “What I was trying to say is – without a living consciousness to contextualize them, the statements are just… stories. When I consume a statement – read it, hear it, doesn’t matter – I See the events play out through the victim’s eyes. My lived experience of it is essential to the recording and preservation of the story. I need to be able to recall how it feels, not just summarize the major points of interest.” He sighs again. “And… that’s also the point of reliving the events in the nightmares. All of it is to keep the memory fresh. To keep the story – the fear – alive.”

When he looks up to see all four of them staring at him, he begins to rub his arms absently, increasingly self-conscious. He can feel the semicircle grooves leftover from where his fingernails cut into the skin.

“So… yeah,” he finishes awkwardly. “The Archive is defined by the statements and the fear that embodies them. The Beholding always hungers for more, and the Archive is a… a receptacle for all of its knowledge. The continual curation of new statements is what sustains it. Without that, it withers.”

“And dies?” Basira asks.

The question isn’t unkind, per se, simply businesslike: an eagerness to discover an answer heedless of whatever messy emotions it might elicit. Jon understands that impulse all too well. Not for the first time, he wonders whether Jonah had a secondary, hidden motive for recruiting Basira: a backup Archivist, in the event that his first choice be unable to endure the process.

“I still don’t know if it would physically kill me,” he replies, “but the hungrier I get, the more I forget myself. I’m liable to do things that I wouldn’t normally do, monstrous things.” He huffs. “And at the same time, giving in to that hunger will also make me more monstrous over time. It seems like… either way, I – I can’t avoid losing sight of… well, me. The human part of me. Whatever’s left of it.”

And wouldn’t losing himself be a death of sorts?

In a way, Daisy died the moment the Hunt recaptured her. What she became was her, undoubtedly, but only a small piece of her. The creature that Basira eventually killed… it was an echo of all the hated, feared parts of herself that Daisy had tried so hard to starve out. The rest of her – all the things that altogether made her Daisy – had long since been burned away.

If Jon didn’t manage to find a way out of that doomed future, he suspects that his ultimate fate may have been similar: all the fragile scraps of himself that still belonged to him, every sliver of personal identity, every shred of humanity crushed and buried beneath an ever-swelling ocean of dispassionate knowledge. The Archive would have carried on expanding and curating until, one day, it would have either collapsed under its own weight or simply run out of things to catalogue, then to waste away – but by then, it would have borne no resemblance to the original owner of its ravaged vessel.

Some endings play out in merciless increments. Jon has witnessed – has caused – more than his fair share of pointless, drawn out suffering. It would have been only fitting for his end to follow a similar path.

“Well, shit,” Basira mutters.

“What about statements given consensually?” Martin asks tentatively. “The one I gave you seemed to satisfy the Archive, or – or however you want to call it. And in the past when I’ve given you statements, they never gave me nightmares, so…”

“Anyone aligned with the Eye has a measure of protection from the Archivist,” Jon answers. “I was never privy to Tim’s or Sasha’s nightmares, either. Once Melanie and Basira started working here, their dreams were cut off from me as well. And… last time, Daisy ended up signing an employment contract after returning from the Buried. Same result.”

“Is it just the archival staff, or any Institute employee?” Basira asks.

“I… don’t know,” Jon says thoughtfully. “If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that it’s restricted to those most strongly connected with the Eye. Archival assistants, primarily. Possibly the research department, or at least those individuals who are the most… compatible with the Beholding, so to speak, though I’m not positive.”

Now that the question has been posed, Jon craves an answer.

“But – but experimenting isn’t worth the risk,” he says, mostly in an attempt to dissuade himself from pursuing the matter any further. He’s pleasantly surprised to hear the confidence in his own voice.

As if satisfied with that answer, Basira gives a tiny nod. Jon doubts it’s meant as a vote of confidence or as approval, but her posture does relax somewhat. He doubts that she trusts him by any stretch of the imagination, but for the moment she seems to have decided that he isn’t an imminent threat, at least.

It feels remarkably, disconcertingly like passing a test he didn’t realize was in progress.

Georgie’s eyes are fixed on the floor, her chin propped in her hand and a contemplative pout on her face. Martin has his lips pressed together, as if biting back an objection. Daisy is the only one looking directly at Jon. She hasn’t said a word since Jon gave his confession, but now her head cocked slightly to the side, as if she's weighing her words.

“I have a lot of stories from my Sectioned days,” she muses. “I could –”

“What would you say if I told you that you should go hunt a few monsters?” Jon says immediately.

“I…” Daisy stalls for a moment, and then gives a resigned sigh, understanding. “I would be worried that I wouldn’t be able to stop at a few,” she says grudgingly. Her shoulders slump as she adds, “Or at monsters.”

“Exactly.”

“But wouldn’t it be different?” she asks, perking up again. “The prey doesn’t consent to the hunt. The fear is taken, not freely given. But a statement – that can be consensual.”

“The Hunt cares about the terror of the prey in the moment. The Eye cares about the terror of the victim in the retelling. The consent aspect is only relevant in terms of whether and how it influences the fear. The fear is all they care about, and I doubt anything benign can come of consuming the fear our patrons want, consensual or no.”

“Do you remember what I said about harm reduction?” Georgie has been sitting quietly with her thoughts for so long, Jon startles at the sound of her voice when she rejoins the conversation. “We need to keep you from getting so hungry that it changes who you are, and new statements are the only way to satisfy that hunger. Correct?”

“Well, yes, but –”

“No ‘but.’ According to you, right now your options are statements or starvation.”

Struck with a fleeting impulse for petulance, Jon has to swallow a biting retort. It’s an old habit, hackles rising at having his own words turned against him – something for which Georgie has always had an aptitude. Between an impressive memory, an analytical nature, and a tolerance for confrontation, she’s never been shy to speculate on what’s really going on in Jon’s head at any given moment. That ability to dissect his motivations and insecurities and cognitive distortions – it used to feel like being flayed alive, all the vulnerable bits of him exposed and shoved under a spotlight.

It’s probably fair to say that his inability to weather that level of scrutiny was a big factor contributing to their eventual breakup: his guarded nature was incompatible with her more straightforward approach to relationships.

“I realize it’s not ideal,” she’s saying now, “but taking statements given with informed consent seems like the most ethical choice.”

“It isn’t just unideal, it’s – it’s –” Jon puts one hand over his eyes, rubbing his forehead and fighting back the urge to shout. “This isn’t a solution.”

It’s still feeding the Eye. It’s still capitalizing on other people’s trauma. And the stories Daisy has to offer… Jon has to wonder how many of them feature Daisy as a victim or a bystander, and whether those outnumber the ones where she herself is the object of fear. He’s taken statements from Avatars before. Some of them were indeed stories of experiencing fear firsthand. Others, though… the fear threaded through the statement came not from the teller, but from their victims.

Jon isn’t keen on siphoning off the secondhand terror of Daisy’s prey. Maybe he can’t afford to be picky, but if there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s that lines have to be drawn somewhere.

“We can keep looking for a better alternative,” Georgie says, “but for now… think of it as a stopgap measure.” Sensing Jon’s continued aversion to the idea, she continues: “If your own wellbeing isn’t enough to convince you, consider how you starving would affect other people.”

“It might make me more dangerous,” Jon says quietly.

“I mean – maybe, I guess? But that’s not what I meant.” At Jon’s blank expression, Georgie sighs. “When you suffer, it hurts more than just you. You have people who care about you. They’re sitting with you right now.”

“Still, I – I can’t ask that of –”

“Oh, come off it, Sims,” Daisy says, rolling her eyes. “You crawled into hell to drag me out when all I’d done was treat you like prey. And even after seeing what it was like, you went back in and brought me back a second time.”

“Yes, but –”

“If I sign a contract to work in the archives, it’ll stop you showing up in my dreams, right?”

“Yes. I’m – I’m sorry, again, about –”

“And it’ll keep new nightmares from cropping up if I give you more statements?”

“Well, yes –”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Jon opens and closes his mouth soundlessly several times.

“I – I – I don’t want you to sign yourself over to the Beholding just so I can – treat your memories like a – like a snack” – Jon flings one arm out in a sweeping gesture, supplementing the disgust with which he says the word – “without facing any consequences!”

He looks around at the others, arm still outstretched in the air, waiting for someone to back him up on this. When no one does, he huffs a bewildered chuckle and withdraws his arm to comb his fingers through his hair instead. Why is he the only one making a fuss about this? He thought he could count on Basira at least to raise an objection, but she’s just staring off to the side, apparently lost in thought.

“I was already considering signing a contract anyway,” Daisy says. “Basira said you had a theory that the Slaughter’s effects on Melanie were slowed by her connection to the Eye, yeah?”

“Yes,” he admits cautiously.

“We were thinking – maybe it’ll do the same for me with the Hunt.”

“Did it help last time?” Basira cuts in, as if she’d never tapped out of the discussion.

“I’m not positive,” Jon hedges. “It was a theory we’d considered, yes, but it’s not like we had much of a sample size to test that hypothesis.”

He wishes he’d thought to ask these kinds of questions after the world ended, when he actually had a chance of getting the answers. In his defense, he had a lot on his mind – and it’s not like he considered the possibility of coming back in time to actually make use of that information.

“And it didn’t entirely silence the call of the Hunt,” he adds, looking back to Daisy. “You still deteriorated the longer you refused to answer it.”

“Hm.” Basira’s contemplative expression returns as she withdraws to commune with her own thoughts again.

“Well, it’s not like I’m going anywhere anyway,” Daisy says with a shrug. “Basira’s trapped here. So are you. And I don’t think I can be trusted to leave here without giving in to the Hunt again. I have nothing to lose by signing a contract, and…”

Her eyes gravitate towards Jon’s throat. Mechanically, he reaches up to adjust the scarf around his neck, to ensure the scar there is covered. At the guilty expression on Daisy’s face, Jon has to look away.

“If it can help,” Daisy continues, “then I think telling some stories is the absolute least I can do after… everything.”

“How many do you have, do you think?” Georgie asks, once again settling into problem-solving mode.

“Don’t know. Several. A couple dozen? Maybe more, depending on how far we can stretch the definition of a statement.”

“I have a handful as well,” Basira says, her tone wholly unreadable. “Not many, but… a few of the things that happened while you were dead should count as statements, I think.”

“I – I couldn’t ask you to –”

“I’m not offering; I’m just inventorying all the options on the table,” Basira says with an air of finality.

Curiously, Martin seems to tense at Basira’s words, shifting restively in his seat and looking askance at her.

“How much time does that buy us, do you think?” he asks, throwing brief, surreptitious glances in Basira’s direction. “How long would a few dozen statements last you?”

“I… I don’t know,” Jon says, still altogether uncomfortable with the idea. “If I ration myself, then – a while, hopefully? Hypothetically? But…”

He’s loathe to elaborate, but when did keeping secrets and denying reality ever help?

“Last time, it kept getting progressively worse. I needed to feed more and more frequently in order to stave off the hunger. The side effects of abstaining grew more severe. I want to hope that it will be different this time. Maybe giving in to the hunger in the first place only encouraged the Archivist’s… evolution. Whet my appetite. It’s possible that refraining from hunting will… I don’t know, slow the process? Maybe? B-but at the same time…”

He trails off, lips parted, unable to say the words.

“Jon?” Martin prompts gently.

“It’s… I’m sorry, but I – I have trouble being optimistic about it. Coming back didn’t… it didn’t reset the Archivist’s progress. I’m the product of what I’ve done up to this point, even if I’m the only one who remembers any of it. I still have all the marks. And… the Archive fledged and thrived in the apocalypse.”

“Meaning?” Basira leans forward, watching him intently.

“The Archive is accustomed to a feast, not a famine. Millions of statements filtering through every moment without pause. Even when humanity started dying off – when there was less and less fear to go around, when even the monsters started to decay in that place – the Archive was still sated, because I could See everything. No matter how few and far between those pockets of terror became, as long as fear was being suffered somewhere, the Archive had a steady source of sustenance.”

It wouldn’t have lasted forever, of course. Everything has an ending. But that had still been a ways off when Jon left that place.

“I probably would have been one of the last things standing, by the end,” he says softly.

“And you think the hunger will be worse this time because you aren’t used to being hungry,” Basira says.

“More or less,” Jon mumbles, shamefaced. “Coming back to the past, to now… there was no transition between plenty and want. I – the Archive – was just… dropped into a – a habitat it was never adapted to survive in. It’s like a… like a non-native species, as far as this reality is concerned. Like taking a fish out of water and expecting it to evolve lungs on the spot.”

“Hm.” Basira cups her chin in one hand, running a thumb slowly over her lips as she thinks.

“I plan to ration myself as strictly as possible, of course. I just want to establish the possibility that things might – escalate, at some point.”

“If it comes to that, we can deal with it then,” Georgie says. “In the meantime, we should just…”

“Take things one crisis at a time?” Jon tries to temper his bitterness with a weak smile, without much success.

“I mean, yeah, basically,” Georgie says. “But in order for this to work, you need to be honest with us.”

“I – I am, I –”

“I’m not accusing you of lying, Jon. I just mean… well, you have a long history of ignoring your own limitations, and –”

“You’re not good at taking care of yourself,” Martin interjects. His cheeks go pink and he tosses an apologetic glance in Georgie’s direction. “S-sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“No worries,” Georgie says. Martin looks uncertain until she grins and, still making eye contact with him, jerks her chin in Jon’s direction. “By all means, go on.”

Emboldened, Martin turns his attention back to Jon, who meets his eyes with no small amount of apprehension. If Martin is intent on compiling a laundry list of examples of Jon’s poor self-care – and judging from that worryingly familiar look on his face, he is – then he has ample material to choose from. Jon barely has time to brace himself before Martin launches into his lecture.

“You used to forget to eat. You never took lunch unless I hassled you. I had to nag you to go home at night.” He’s counting off on his fingers now, Jon notes with dismay. “You went through most days fueled by a maximum of four hours of sleep and frankly alarming amounts of caffeine. You insisted on coming back to work, against medical advice, immediately after almost being eaten alive by worms.”

Jon opens his mouth to speak – and promptly shuts it again when Martin gives him what Jon can (with equal amounts of affection and dread) only refer to as that look.

“You could barely walk. I had to threaten to forcibly remove you from the building before you agreed to go home. You spent the next several weeks sneaking – hell, limping around down here” – Martin makes a sweeping gesture with his arm – “where we found your predecessor’s murdered body, and –”

“Yes, yes, okay,” Jon interrupts, hands flapping anxiously. “I get your point.”

“I also had to threaten to withhold the Admiral from you in order to get you to go to the clinic to have your third-degree burn treated,” Georgie chimes back in. Jon glares at her; she looks far too entertained by the proceedings.

“I was – I was on the lam,” he protests. “I couldn’t exactly go waltzing about in public.”

“But you were perfectly willing to go chasing down Avatars, apparently.”

“I…”

“Oh,” she adds, “and today was the first time you actually slept since you woke up from a coma.”

“I was asleep for six months,” Jon mutters, arms crossed, bouncing one heel against the floor. “I think that more than makes up for –”

“You tried to pass off a stab wound that required five – five!” – Martin holds up five fingers for added (and unnecessary, in Jon’s opinion) emphasis – “stitches as an accident with a – with a bread knife.”

Somehow, Martin manages to sound as indignant now as he did on the day it happened.

“That was several lifetimes ago,” Jon says primly. “At some point you have to let me live it down.”

“It hasn’t even been two years!”

“Seriously, Jon?” Daisy, who has been hiding a smirk behind her hand throughout the entire exchange, finally fails to contain her stifled laughter. “A bread knife?”

“I – I panicked,” Jon says weakly, cheeks burning. “Martin cornered me in the breakroom and it was the first thing I saw, and I just –”

Martin starts in again. “You were actively exsanguinating –”

“Th-that – that’s an exaggeration,” Jon sputters, watching Georgie out of the corner of his eye to gauge her reaction. She’s shaking her head with a faint smile, and Jon… well, Jon supposes that playful scorn is preferable to actual scorn.

“– and you refused to let me take you to the clinic until I threatened to call an ambulance,” Martin finishes.

“I was –” Jon twists a lock of hair around his fingers as he scrambles for some way to save face. “I would have been –”

“I think it’s safe to say you have no sense of self-preservation,” Basira says, and even she has a hint of amusement in her tone now.

“They have a point, Sims.”

“Et tu, Daisy?” Jon says, hoping to garner a laugh – or, failing that, at least halt the relentless bombardment of admonishments. Daisy simply raises her eyebrows and folds her arms, unmoved.

“Do I need to revisit some of the things we discussed in the Coffin?”

“No,” he says sullenly. When no one else speaks, he continues, somewhat irately: “Are we quite finished with the roast session?”

“For now,” Georgie says. “The point is, don’t run yourself into the ground just to test the limits of what you can endure.”

“And don’t let rationing statements turn into just another way to punish yourself,” Martin says sternly. Then he bites his lip, speaking gently now: “You… you deserve better than that.”

I really, really don’t, Jon thinks. Having no desire to unleash another lecture, though, he keeps the contrary comment to himself.

“Besides, letting yourself get that bad probably makes things worse in the long run,” Georgie says. “Like walking on a sprained ankle. Maybe you can endure the pain, but the longer you ignore it, the more likely you are to cause even more damage, and recovery takes longer than it would have if you’d just attended to it in the first place.”

“Speaking from personal experience, are we?” Jon allows a hint of retaliatory smugness slip into his voice.

“Yes,” Georgie says, rolling her eyes. “That ankle is still weak. Which is why you should listen to me. Just… try to care about yourself even a fraction of how much others care about you, alright?

Jon sighs. “Point taken.”

“You can trust us,” Martin says.

“I – I know that. I do trust you. I’m just…” Afraid. “I don’t want you to –”

“– mark me out as something other –”

“– getting used to people making polite excuses not to look at me –”

“– it wears you down to be someone whom nobody wants to see – I called out again and again but nobody came –”

Frantic, he covers his mouth with his hand to halt the recitation; the words continue to pour forth undeterred, albeit muffled and likely – hopefully – too indistinct for the others to understand.

“– I remember shouting, recriminations, and I was abandoned –”

“– no one to blame but my own stupid self – blundering in where I had no right to go –”

A flash flood of restless energy breaks through the dam and then it’s racing through his veins, filling his mouth and his mind with white noise. He kicks one foot out and brings it stomping back down to the ground in a burst of sheer infuriation and near-panic. A crawling sensation travels up and down the length of his spine, a parade of feather-light pinpricks reminiscent of thousands of scuttling spider legs.

The slight whimper that works its way up his throat is thankfully stifled by the hand still pressed to his lips.

“Breathe through it,” Basira tells him.

Irritation flares to life at the reminder, but Jon forcibly snuffs it out before the spark can catch. Basira is only trying to help – and in a way she knows has helped before.

He breathes.

A frustrated noise – something between a snarl and a whine – spills out on his exhale, and he presses another hand atop the first as if it can render him entirely soundless. Before another wave of self-directed fury can take him, Jon coaxes himself to take another breath in through his nose. And another. And another, counting up until the pressure behind his eyes lets up and the static clears from his thoughts – at which point, he’s forced to confront the four pairs of eyes playing patient audience to his outburst.

Like a toddler’s tantrum, he thinks acidly, burning with humiliation.

“Sorry.” Although the scathing edge to the word is reserved solely for himself, he takes another breath before speaking again, lest the others assume the ire is directed at them. “Sorry. I’ll try to control it better.”

“It’s fine, Jon,” Martin says. “We know you aren’t doing it on purpose.”

“Anyway,” Basira says, her peremptory tone indicating a return to the subject at hand, “can we all agree that this is the best strategy for now?”

Jon looks down, tracing the weave of his scarf, focusing wholly on the texture of fabric against fingertips in a vain attempt to distract from the pins and needles still skittering across his skin. It takes a moment before he registers the silence. When he looks up, the others are staring at him. Basira raises an eyebrow, clearly waiting for his response.

“Even if I do agree to this,” Jon says warily, “I still – I know it’s a lot to ask, but I still need to be monitored for any signs of…” Although the question is meant for all of them, Jon shifts his gaze to make direct eye contact with Basira as he asks it. “Can you let me know, truthfully, if I – if it looks like I might… if you think I’m a danger?”

“Jon,” Martin sighs, “you’re not –”

“Yes,” Basira says decisively.

Martin glares at her, his mouth falling open with a combination of shock and protective outrage. Jon recognizes that expression, and he jumps in before Martin can get a word out.

“Thank you, Basira.”

Now Jon is the target of Martin’s glower. He looks offended, betrayed almost, as if Jon took Basira’s side in a dispute between the two of them. Again, though, Martin doesn’t get the chance to scold.

“Alright then,” Daisy says, stretching. “It’s settled. You” – her eyes swivel to Jon, their piercing intensity prompting him to sit up at attention – “come to me when you’re hungry.”

“Before you cross the boundary into ‘starving,’” Martin says, carving out an opportunity to chastise despite the interruption.

“Consider me a vending machine of horror stories,” Daisy quips.

Jon grimaces and rubs the back of his neck. “Do you have to describe it that way?”

“Oh, quit grousing.” With a flash of teeth, a wolfish grin spreads across her face. “What, would you prefer I write up a menu?”

Her expression turns solemn when Jon winces and looks away.

“Sore nerve?” she asks, suddenly and uncharacteristically delicate.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” The question is nearly inaudible, Jon’s eyes fixed on the floor.

“I wouldn’t have offered if I wasn’t.”

Fearing his voice might crack if he tries to speak, Jon bites down on his lip and tucks his chin to his chest, letting his hair fall to hide the others from view. He shuts his eyes for good measure and swallows hard, determined to head off the tears threatening to gather.

“Hey.” Daisy stretches out a leg and kicks his foot gently. It’s enough to make him raise his head cautiously. “I was just teasing. Really.”

“I –” It comes out as a croak. Jon clears his throat and blinks several times to dispel the stinging pressure in the corners of his eyes. “I know.”

“It is… so weird to see you two like this,” Basira says with an air of baffled wonder.

Jon notices Martin fidgeting restively out of the corner of his eye. When he looks directly at him, he sees Martin glaring at Daisy with a mixture of worry, suspicion, and resentment.

It isn’t surprising; he never really did forgive Daisy for what she did to Jon. Neither did Jon, for that matter, but… Daisy was so changed after the Buried, it was difficult to see her as the same person who dragged him into the woods. She was, undoubtedly – she was the first to admit that – but she was remorseful and wholly dedicated to changing her behavior, even knowing it might well kill her. She never asked for forgiveness, never denied the harm she’d caused, never tried to justify or shirk responsibility for her actions.

What she later became… there was nothing left of the Daisy who he’d come to see as a friend. For that Daisy, being reclaimed by the Hunt was a fate worse than death. Worse than the Coffin, even. She would have preferred to die as herself, and on her own terms – and the Hunt stole even that ounce of humanity from her. It made her forget that she didn't want to be a Hunter.

Jon dreads watching her waste away again, but not nearly as much as he fears the Hunt devouring her whole.

“People change,” he says, looking from Martin to Basira, hoping those two words can convey all the things he cannot say. They both look unconvinced, albeit in slightly different ways.

The silence drags on uncomfortably long until Georgie claps her hands on her knees.

“You never answered the question, Jon. Are you alright taking statements from Daisy? At least until we can find a better solution?”

“I…”

He glances around the circle, looking at each face in turn, trying to discern their opinions on the matter. Daisy gives him a reassuring nod. Martin has an almost pleading expression on his face, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth and wringing his hands in his lap.

Basira is… entirely inscrutable, much to Jon’s dismay. He didn’t expect otherwise, but he still wishes he could get a read on her, determine exactly how she categorizes him now. Probably not as a trustworthy ally. At best, perhaps she sees him as human enough to be suffered to live, but on thin ice and under probation. At worst, she sees him as an irredeemable monster and is simply keeping her opinion to herself for the time being.

Or – no, the worst might be what he was to her last time. She saw him as a monster, yes, and was fully prepared to put him down – like a rabid animal, he thought when confronted with that wording – if he became too much of a danger. It was comforting to know that Basira wouldn’t let sentiment get in the way if he had to be stopped. Less comforting was how she saw him as an asset: a dangerous tool to be used and then locked away once he’d fulfilled his purpose.

Granted, he gave Basira permission to use him – asked her to, in fact. It would be unfair to resent her for taking him up on an offer that he himself put on the table. If his powers could be used to help for once, he was fully willing to sacrifice his humanity to do so. After all, he was already too far gone, he figured – and everyone else seemed to agree.

Georgie certainly seemed to think so. Melanie told him outright that he came back wrong. He had likewise interpreted Martin’s avoidance as a comment on his having changed for the worst, at least initially. And he knew from the moment he woke up that Basira saw him as something other, as something more akin to the monsters they were fighting rather than an ally. He understood why they all felt that way, agreed with their assessments even, but it was soul-crushing nonetheless.

But even if he couldn’t have – didn’t deserve – trust or companionship, he still needed a reason, something to justify choosing not to die. If being wanted wasn’t an option, the least he could do is avoid being a burden. An annoyance. If approval wasn’t on the table, at least he could convince people that he was worth keeping around. And hadn’t that approach always been second nature to him? In a way, he didn’t tend to seek affection so much as try to avoid rejection.

Ultimately, though, pursuing that strategy started to feel sickeningly familiar. It wasn’t until much later that he realized why: between Jonah and the Beholding – and in all likelihood the Web as well – he’d grown accustomed to being seen as a means to an end, and that made it all the more difficult to see himself as a who rather than as a what. It’s a distinction he still struggles with – particularly during those times when the Archive makes its presence known.

He might not have much right to ask for trust or approval, but that doesn’t change the fact that he craves it – perhaps from Basira most of all. If even her opinion of him can change… well, it would go a long way in helping him to believe that he really does have a chance.

“Jon,” Basira says, snapping him back to attention.

Shit. How long has he been staring?

“We need an answer,” she continues.

Jon can’t help but wonder if this is another test. If he agrees, will she see it as further proof of his inhumanity, as evidence that he isn’t trying to resist? If he refuses, will it make her suspicious, lead her to believe he plans on going hunting instead? He’s never been skilled at reading between the lines, at interpreting social cues, at deconstructing the unspoken. The best he can do is ask questions and guess blindly as to the right way to respond – and agonize over the repercussions should he get it wrong. Basira has a way of making that already difficult process even more intimidating.

“Jon,” Basira repeats herself, growing impatient now.

“O-okay,” he says quietly. “It’s… worth a try, I suppose.”

She gives a curt nod. As always, it gives him no insight into her thoughts. He has no time resume brooding, though, as Martin draws his attention with an audible sigh of relief. When Jon glances at him, Martin graces him with a smile – small, almost shy, but genuine. Jon tries and fails to mirror it.

Apparently finished with Jon for the moment, Basira turns her attention to Daisy.

“Come on,” she says, rising to her feet and tapping Daisy on the shoulder. “It’s time for your exercises.”

Obediently, Daisy starts to stand, only for her knees to buckle beneath her. Basira is there to catch her.

“Been sitting too long,” Daisy grunts, embarrassment coloring her cheeks.

“Can you manage the ladder?” Daisy shakes her head, flushing darker. “That’s fine,” Basira says, though Jon thinks he can detect a hint of fear – maybe even melancholy – in her tone now. “Let’s just… walk for now. Wake your legs up.”

The two of them start off down the tunnel, Basira supporting half of Daisy’s weight as she staggers forward.

“Jon?” Georgie says softly.

“Hm.”

“Try to cut yourself some slack, yeah?”

Jon really can’t afford to do that, but saying so will only start them talking in circles again. Martin leans closer and places a hand on Jon’s knee.

“Hey,” he says, looking Jon in the eye with overwhelming sincerity. “We’ve got this, alright?”

“Alright,” Jon responds, and wills himself to believe it.

The three of them exit the tunnel in silence. It isn’t until Jon hoists himself through the trapdoor – Martin assisting in pulling him to his feet – that one of them speaks.

“Oh,” Georgie says, looking at Jon, “by the way…”

“Yes?” Jon says, apprehensive.

“Melanie asked me to tell you that she’s ready to talk, whenever you are.”

“O-oh.”

“I know it's not a great time –”

“No, I – I think I…” Jon nods. “I think I’m ready, too.”

“It doesn’t have to be tonight,” Georgie says hurriedly.

“I really am okay to –”

Martin looks ready to object, but Georgie gets there first.

“Okay, correction: it won’t be tonight,” she interrupts, fixing him with a stern look now. “You’ve had hardly any rest since coming out of the Coffin. I think you should get some actual sleep tonight. If – if – you’re feeling up to it tomorrow, we can arrange something then.”

“Fine,” Jon sighs. He knows better than to argue with the combined tenacity of Georgie and Martin.

And he has to admit, he is rather tired.

A little over a half-hour later, Martin and Jon are back in Document Storage.

When he suggests Jon go to bed, Martin is prepared for a protracted argument. Jon acquiesces surprisingly quickly, though, his only condition being that Martin get some sleep as well. It takes slightly longer to convince Jon to take the cot. Martin pulls up a chair and sits at the bedside, refusing to budge as Jon makes his counterarguments. Eventually, though, Jon starts nodding off mid-protest. It’s only a matter of time before he begrudgingly gives in – but not before demanding that Martin take the better blanket. With an amused shake of his head, Martin agrees to the compromise.

Jon slips between the sheets, Martin leans back in his chair, and for a long moment the two of them watch each other in silence. Jon’s hand rests near the pillow, fingers crooked loosely, palm turned up like an invitation. Martin has the sudden urge to reach out and take it.

Another minute passes before Martin realizes that… well, that’s a thing he can do now, isn’t it? What’s stopping him?

Slowly, tentatively, he extends his hand, lets it hover uncertainly above Jon’s, fingertips barely brushing. He applies the slightest pressure, giving Jon every opportunity to pull back. He doesn’t. Jon interlocks their fingers, curling them over in a firm grasp, and peers up at Martin through his lashes with mingled uncertainty and hope.

“Is this okay?” Martin asks quietly.

As answer, Jon lets out a contented sigh, eyelids fluttering closed as a sleepy smile spreads across his face.

“'Course,” he mumbles, already drifting off. “Always will.”

Martin will follow not long after, slumping precariously to the side, head lolling onto his shoulder, and hand still held fast in a warm, sure grip. It’s a posture that will undoubtedly leave him sore by the time he wakes up, but that discomfort will be overshadowed by the way he feels in these shared, quiet moments: seen, accepted, wanted, embraced.

Anchored, he thinks – and for the first time in months, no thoughts of Loneliness shadow him as he falls to sleep.

End Notes:

Jon: *feels safe for the first time in a literally unmeasurable amount of time and promptly passes right back tf out* Martin: oh no he’s cute

Jon's gotten a SNACK and a NAP now. I hope you're all happy. :P (Just kidding. Every time someone tells me to let Jon have a nap, I am also @ing myself - and Jonny Sims - with the exact same demand.)

(On that note, I find it funny that as I was writing this chapter and finally giving Jon the nap he deserves, he was ALSO finally getting the nap he deserves in canon.)

Citations for Jon’s Archive-speak are as follows: MAG 135; 130/067/066; 032/037.

Next chapter: Melanie gets some actual screentime again!!

#tma #tma fic #long post #the magnus archives

29 notes · View notes