Chapter Text
Something was extremely strange about Tim's new job.
In fairness, he had set out searching for the strange. After he had lost his brother he had gone to the police, private investigators, spiritualists, even a few secret societies, and he'd seen plenty of weird things, but none that had given him any answers. He had thought the Magnus Institute might be able to do that. When he had seen a notice advertising for an assistant role at a scholarly establishment belonging to Jonah Magnus - a name he knew in connection to that of Smirke, and appearing in all manner of unnatural tales - he had seized upon it immediately, but he had thought that either his lack of education or the fact that his only experience was as a lithographer probably would mean that he'd have to fight tooth and nail for the position, turn up his charm as high as it would go. And yet, Tim had been hired after only the briefest of interviews with Magnus himself; he remembered the encounter hazily, as though in a dream, but he was fairly certain he had signed a contract, been shown briefly around the Institute, and told where he might be expected to live, all on that one same day. Apparently another of the new assistants had been set up in the same place: best not to be alone , Mister Magnus had said, lips curling up in a private joke. That was the first of the oddness about the place itself that had really caught Tim's notice. It was far from the last.
(Jonah Magnus wasn't a mannequin, Tim was pretty sure. He looked every bit the gentleman; ageing a little, perhaps, but otherwise the very image of prim propriety and fashion, nothing like the so clearly otherworldly, uncanny thing that had been below Covent Garden. What was unsettling about Magnus was far more subtle and took far longer for Tim to wrap his head around. He was a terrifying man, but of the sort where you didn't notice how scared you had been until long after he had left.)
Day to day, the work of preserving and filing statements or investigating their particulars might have been boring, if the contents of the statements hadn't been so outright bizarre. Many were nonsensical, others blatantly imagined or false, but some were... less so. Enough had the hallmarks of what Tim was beginning to learn were the true horrors: the air of shifted reality, the not-quite or no-longer people, the places that should not have been, and the constant, pervading terror, both preceded and inspired by them. That was what he had endeavoured to discover, those terrible things that lurked beneath and around the normal world. Yet he was, apparently, expected to just put each abomination neatly in its box and note down any connections to others, any evidence, any survivors - not to try and understand or fight. They had objects in storage as well, but he had been warned by his stricken-faced colleague that the artefacts were best left locked well away, for his own safety never touched. Any weird books especially were never to be read without first consulting the archivist.
And that was the strangest thing of all, that the archivist was nowhere to be found. If he truly existed at all he must have been nocturnal, because the only people that Tim had met were archival assistants, and one of them only very briefly. Not that he was unhappy working with Martin, of course. Martin was the same at work as in their shared lodgings, wary at first but personable, very determined to be helpful, slightly clumsy. He had been employed at the Institute only a few weeks longer than Tim, as it turned out, but that was long enough to show him the ropes, and Tim was glad of it. For all their relative lack of supervision down in the dingy basement that held the archives, Tim could never seem to escape the invasive feeling there that he was being watched, and judged, and found to be inadequate. Around Martin he felt a little less surveilled.
Which was probably why he hadn’t questioned how Martin knew what their assigned tasks were every day for near a month. Not until now, anyway.
They were in the archives proper, away from their desks and in among the needless rows of bookshelves and indexes, when it abruptly occurred to Tim to ask Martin where he was getting their instruction from, hands stalling on a copy of A Natural History of Lycanthropy . So he did.
Martin blinked back at him, caught off-guard by the question.
“...From Jon?”
“Which Jon?”
Evidently he had lost Martin.
“You met him,” said Martin, slowly, confused and testing. “When you were first being shown around - I suppose he made himself scarce pretty quickly, but -”
“No, I mean, Jon the archivist, the boss, or young Jon, about our age?”
Martin’s face twitched in a way that Tim couldn’t read.
“Both?” he said, a little strangled. “They’re the same person.”
But the Jon he had met couldn’t be any older than… than Danny would have been. The thought of his brother evaporated any levity that might have arisen, reminding Tim why he was there in the first place.
Jon was a twig of a teenager, all elbows and knees, dressed smartly and morosely but with his hair all a mess, and with a scowl fixed permanently on his face to one degree or another. He had given Tim a desultory handshake at their first, and only proper meeting; when they made eye contact, though, Jon had quite suddenly turned white, mumbled some excuse about finishing writing a letter as he darted around Tim and fled. At the time, Tim had merely taken him for shy. Martin certainly talked about Jon warmly enough, and Tim had caught occasional glimpses of him at a distance as Jon scurried in and out of the archives, seeming very harried. Presumably all of Jon’s time was occupied working for the archivist and he would calm down eventually.
The archivist’s office, on the other hand, had always just appeared to be empty.
“That doesn’t make any sense!” Frustration bubbled up in Tim. “Is there a problem with me?”
“That’s not-”
“Well, he turned tail and ran, Martin. If it didn’t seem so ridiculous then I’d say he’s been avoiding me ever since, too.”
Tim’s tone of voice made it fairly clear that he didn’t actually think it ridiculous at all. Martin grimaced, but stood his ground - though he did not do so convincingly. For such a tall person, he never seemed to think to use his height to loom over anyone.
“It’s fine,” he said, tone firm, words explaining absolutely nothing. “Mister Magnus keeps him busy, and he… he has his reasons.”
Martin was far too sweet, too prepared to look for the best in these situations, Tim decided, doubts unassuaged. Either that or he was in on it. For the moment, Tim returned his attention to the index card for metamorphoses he had been gesturing with, and let the gears turn in his mind as he gathered up the books listed on it.
A few minutes later, by the time he and Martin had their encyclopaedias laid out for examination and the lamps in the dim archives turned as bright as they would go, he had more questions ready.
“Even ignoring how weird he’s being toward me,” Tim began, wilfully breezing past the resigned little sigh that Martin gave. “Don’t you think it’s unusual for Jon to have such a high position at his age? I mean, he’s younger than either of us.”
Martin kept his eyes resolutely on the cramped print below them and didn’t dignify the question with a response - although Tim saw his freckled nose scrunch in mild exasperation. Tim resorted to shock tactics.
“…is he Magnus’s son?”
There: Martin raised his curly head, startled.
“What?! No, he’s n- Tim, they don’t share a name.”
Tim shrugged pointedly.
“On the wrong side of the sheets, maybe?”
Neither of them could help but look around, checking that they weren’t being overhead gossiping instead of concentrating at their work. But Magnus usually signalled his physical presence with a great deal of pomp, and Tim had decided that the eerie sense of constant observation was merely a feeling that the architecture gave you down here, that was all.
“Still no,” Martin hissed, voice lowered, posture a little defensive. “They don’t even look alike, for heaven’s sake.”
That was true, actually. Magnus had alarming grey eyes to Jon’s deep brown, and his smug air would look horribly out of place on Jon’s angular face.
“Alright,” Tim conceded. “But Jon does live in his house.”
Martin waved that off immediately.
“He’s just Magnus’s apprentice.”
As soon as the words left his lips he winced, regretting it; Tim could pinpoint the precise moment that Martin realised how odd that declaration was. He leaned across the desk toward Martin, who leaned back as though he could not easily tower above Tim if he wished.
“But apprentice as what ?” he pressed. “It’s not as though Mister Magnus is an archivist himself, he’s just a toff who owns an archive.”
“Um, I - listen, I think it made more sense when he first hired Jon, just as a, uh, boy. And that was a good few years ago, and now Jon has skills, so he didn’t let him go - ah, he kept him on.”
Mentally, Tim noted down didn’t let him go as possibly the most suspicious phrase that anyone had ever said, even if it wasn’t directly connected to any circus. There was, more importantly, something in Martin’s tone of voice that told him that they were referring to more than just archival experience.
“ Skills ? What kind of skills?”
For a moment it looked almost as though Martin was considering just spilling the truth. But then a flash of what Tim might have called guilt came across his expression, and looked determinedly back down to his book, jotting down the word sorcerers like that counted as productively working.
Still, Tim knew he was close to cracking him.
“Oh, no, Martin, you can’t just refuse to answer. Jon’s the archivist , and he’s acting shady toward me in particular, and you know why, and you won’t tell me? And I’m supposed to accept that?”
“Tim, shh-”
“I refuse.”
“It’s - I mean, it’s complicated,”
“I bet!”
“No, Tim, I-I really can’t-”
“Come on.”
“It’s not fair to him to-”
“Martin, I swear, if you don’t tell me then I’ll never stop asking about it. At home, too.”
“Um…”
“And I’ll find out eventually!”
Tim shut his (completely ignored) book with a dramatic, final snap , sure that the threat of constant irritation would be enough.
Martin bit his lip and fell silent. Then he seemed to come reluctantly to a decision, and opened his mouth to speak.
*
Tim found himself storming into the Head Archivist’s office, disbelief and glee warring in him at the perfect, insane, explanation that he had found.
Jon, resembling nothing more than a grumpy kitten, startled to his feet as the door banged open, staring up in shock at him, and Tim heard himself say:
“You’re psychic?!”
