Chapter Text
Waking up was not a fast process, even after Oliver Banks’ visit. The rattle of Jonathan Sims’ breathing came first, sending the few machines left hooked up to his body blaring incessantly, scaring the daylights out of the charge nurse. His other organs quickly followed suit, like a chain of old cogs in a clock creaking to life again, ticking determinedly forward.
The doctors were baffled. The local news put out a story that received a fair amount of attention. The nurses contacted his next of kin.
Before Jon had set off for the Wax Museum in Yarmouth, he had hastily changed his next of kin from Georgie to Martin, and hadn’t given it too much thought. He’d only considered what might happen if he didn’t come back from the Unknowing, and…well. There had been only one person on his mind at the time.
Strangely, when Jonathan Sims’ contact information was finally found, the next of kin information was illegible to anyone who tried to make it out. The other, most recent of his emergency contacts remained one Georgie Barker. The nurses contacted her without incident.
Georgie Barker and Basira Hussain were the only two visitors Jonathan Sims had in the days leading up to the opening of his eyes. None of the nurses or doctors knew to miss anyone else’s presence.
As it was, Basira was the one at Jon’s bedside when he woke completely. His eyes cracked open first to the bright, angry fluorescents on the ceiling. There was a distant beeping in his ears, each beep creeping closer to the last at each new interval. For a moment, he just stared up at the generic, white ceiling tiles, familiarizing himself with the flood of sensation that came with being newly alive. The smell of antiseptic. The sounds of machines, distant voices, phones ringing. The distinct beep of the heart monitor that he assumed was connected to him because it beeped faster and faster along with the organ behind his ribs.
He heard something new, the creak of an old, rickety chair, and turned his head, the stiff sheets sparking against skin that felt oversensitive, raw. Basira stared at him from the plain, metal seat at the bedside, her body tense, book on her lap all but forgotten.
“Jon,” she greeted cautiously.
Jon swallowed, his memories coming back to him in bits and pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. “Basira,” he said back, his voice croaked, unused. He sounded like a creature that had crawled out of the grave.
Basira’s head tilted as she looked at him appraisingly. “Is it actually you?”
Jon considered the question. Considered the breath in his own lungs, the beat of his heart, the presence of Beholding in his mind, like an eye itself at the back of his skull. Its presence had been there before the Unknowing, at least. It wasn’t new.
“I think so,” he answered her, after a moment. “Though I’m not sure how you could be sure of that.”
Basira’s eyebrow quirked up. “Helpful,” she said dryly.
Jon shrugged, acutely aware of the snag of the covers and the shift of the hospital gown against his skin. “Sorry.”
Basira studied him, but she seemed strangely calm and somehow reassured by this, even though Jon had given her nothing of substance. “Should I get a nurse?”
“No,” Jon said, taking a big breath that didn’t ache and shifting up on arms that, logically, shouldn’t have been able to take his weight. “I-I think…I think I’m alright.”
Basira’s brows raised slightly, the only sign of reaction. “Right.”
Jon considered her, swallowing, and asked, “how long have I…?”
“Six months,” she answered curtly. “Give or take.”
The words came a bit like a blow, and it took him a moment to get past them as they snagged in his mind. Six months. “A-And…the others, Tim, i-is…?” He looked at her and saw the answer written plainly on her face. Grief closed in like a claw around his heart. “Oh.”
Basira nodded, her eyes far away. “Daisy too.”
Jon swallowed around the lump in his throat. “I…I’m sorry.”
She nodded, lips pressed together. “Yeah.”
There was a brief silence, in which Basira seemed to pull her thoughts back to the present and Jon struggled to get his in order, processing. His eyes caught on the bedside table, on the long forgotten dredges of what looked like tea in a cheap paper cup, and his breath caught.
“What—what about Martin?” he asked her, tripping over his words in the rush to get them out. “Did his plan work, i-is Elias—is Martin alright? Elias didn’t—didn’t hurt him, or…?” He trailed off at the look on Basira’s face, not somber or serious as it had been before, but utterly confused, brows drawn, mouth pinched.
“Who’s Martin?” she asked him, voice flat with confusion.
For a moment, Jon just stared at her. “What—what do you mean who’s—?” When Basira continued to look at him blankly, his heart really began to thunder his chest, in his ears. “Basira, this really isn’t funny.”
Basira’s eyes narrowed as she considered him anew. “I’m not making a joke. What the hell are you talking about?”
“What do you…?” Jon stared at her helplessly, panic really setting in when her expression never changed, when he realized Basira had never been one for tasteless jokes. “Martin,” he pressed, desperately. “Always makes tea for everyone, too nice for his own good, wears jumpers a size too big? Freckles, curly hair?” Jon’s voice grew strained with panic as Basira’s expression only clouded over, recognition never flashing in her eyes. The heart monitor beeped at a frantic pace. “You—he’s been an archival assistant with you since you started, how can you not—for god’s sake, Basira—“
“Calm down, Jon,” Basira said, her voice hard, her eyes narrowed and suspicious.
“No!” Jon shot back wildly, his breath short, panicked thoughts flirting through his mind. “I’m not going to—I—this isn’t—how could you not—?”
A nurse opened the door, her eyes wide. She looked at Jon, and then whirled on Basira. “Out,” she commanded.
Basira tensed, eyes skirting back to Jon, dark and suspicious. “But—“
“Out,” the nurse insisted again, voice firm. “Mr. Sims doesn’t need to be agitated right now.”
“Wait—“ Jon tried, but Basira was getting up, stalking around the nurse toward the door. “Basira—“
“Take a deep breath with me now,” the nurse soothed, coming closer as Basira shot him one, final look over her shoulder. “Let’s try to keep calm.”
But he couldn’t calm down. How could he calm down when—when—
God, what had he woken up to? Was there something wrong with him? With everyone else? Was—was Martin really…?
He shouted after Basira, ignoring the nurse completely, struggling to get out of the bed, frantic.
They sedated him eventually, and just before it all went dark he considered, wishfully, that maybe it had all been a strange fever dream, and that when he woke Martin would be the one there by his bedside like he’d expected, deep down.
Wishful thinking.
He was discharged a few days later, after numerous tests including a psych eval. The psychologist left the room close to tears.
The doctors didn’t want to let him leave so soon. He could see it in the way they looked at him. But he had passed tests he shouldn’t have with flying colors. So he tugged on borrowed clothing from the lost and found, and left without looking back.
His fears were quickly confirmed. Melanie, hardly keen to speak to him at all (the shattered mug on the ground and stained coffee on the wall just behind his head was proof enough of that), had given him the same look of utter bafflement when he asked after Martin. “Who?”
Georgie, barely acquainted with Martin at all, had merely looked at him blankly when he’d tried to spur her memory.
Martin’s desk was a lifeless thing, a wasteland of discarded statements and dust. Gone was the framed photo of his mother and the polaroid of a grinning Tim with an arm wrapped around a sheepish, softly smiling Martin. The polaroid of the three of them at Jon’s surprise party (Sasha taking the photo, always taking them, never in them) had vanished into thin air, elusive to Jon’s frantic rifling through forgotten drawers. Gone too was the notebook Martin always kept at the right corner of his desk, the one Jon would sometimes see him scribbling in from across the room, with his brow furrowed in the utmost concentration.
Jon looked at the empty desk, with its drawers turned out from his desperate searching, and truly felt something like grief in his chest, a choking, sinking feeling that would not go away.
There was only one other person he could think of who might remember, who might have answers to give.
Visitor processing at the prison took hours, but still Jon waited, knee bouncing, jaw clenched. He remembered when he’d asked Basira who she thought had come up with the plan to put Elias away and she had answered, immediately, “Melanie,” as if he were mad.
Jon jolted when the woman in the booth called out his name, a guard waiting, already impatient, at the open door. He was led to a room with a metal table where Elias was already seated, back straight, smug even in his prison jumpsuit and his hands cuffed to the table. “Jon,” he said. “Such a lovely surprise—“
“What happened to Martin while I was asleep?” Jon demanded of him, the sight of his smug face enough to make him instantly furious.
Elias just looked at him for a moment, the tiniest smile quirking at the corner of his mouth and his eyes glinting. “Who?” Elias said, innocently confused, even though Jon could see in his eyes that he knew, he knew, and he wasn’t going to say.
The guard moved quickly and pulled Jon back when he lunged at Elias, hands itching to fist in his collar and snarling a compulsion that he never got to finish, one that Jon knew would have been too weak to work anyway. Elias’ laughing eyes followed him as the guard dragged him out of the room, that knowing smile on his face that boiled Jon’s blood.
A few, restless days passed. Jon hardly slept, hardly recorded anything until the hunger pangs were too painful to ignore. The archive was a hostile, bereft place. Basira and Melanie were convinced that he was something else, something far from human. Sometimes he wondered if they weren’t right. Maybe this was all him. Maybe Martin Blackwood had never really existed, was just some conjured figment of his mind when he most needed comfort, someone on his side. But then he’d remember that smug look on Elias’ face and know what he remembered was real.
Jon missed him like an ache, like a missing limb. He couldn’t call Martin dead because he had simply vanished. Jon thought it was somehow worse. He was mourning someone who everyone else told him had never existed at all.
Jon went searching, at odd intervals, for any trace of him. Martin’s mugs in the cupboard were gone. The jumper Jon had accidentally mixed up with his own laundry and kept, when Martin was still living in the institute, was gone. The squirreled away cassettes with Martin’s recorded poetry were gone.
Every lovely trace of him, gone.
On a particularly bad day, when he could think of nothing else but Martin, he tried to find Martin’s flat from memory. He had helped file the paperwork after the Prentiss incident with the institute and the CDC, and he vaguely remembered the complex, the number on the door.
He searched for the building before the institute opened and found it, his eyes frantically seeking out the appropriate flat number on the buzzer. It was labeled with the name Mabel Rutgers. He stared at the unfamiliar name for a few breaths, that ache rising in him, squeezing at his throat, blurring his vision.
This had been the last thing, the last trace to seek out.
Jon took a shaky step back, and then another, until he was stumbling, his knees hitting the ground, that ache squeezing at his chest until he was sure it would bleed.
When he could stand it, he researched. He investigated similar disappearances, vanishings, anything he could find. Perhaps this was the work of something like the NotThem, changing people’s memories? Or something of the Lonely? He read statement after statement, scouring them for information, all while he grew more suspicious of the latter theory. It didn’t seem like a coincidence that Peter Lukas, the most infamous avatar of the Lonely he knew of, was now the head of the institute.
Jon had tried to book an appointment with him to no avail. The man was always out, busy, booked until next August. The receptionist who informed him never looked him in the eye and without fail he forgot what she had looked like as soon as he stepped into the elevator.
It couldn’t have been a coincidence. And yet, he didn’t know what to do. The Eye was infuriatingly quiet on the matter. When he tried to search for Martin with Beholding, he gave himself an instant headache.
Jon missed him, and no one else even knew he was gone.
It was difficult not to give in completely to despair. Jon yearned for before the Unknowing, before he had woken and everything had gone wrong.
He was so, utterly, achingly lonely.
It was a few weeks after he’d returned to the institute that he went searching in the stacks for a few statements to satisfy his hunger and a few more to research, and he caught a flash of movement from the other side of the isle. Jon peered through the gaps in the bound folders, frowning. It was late enough that Basira had gone home, and Melanie was hardly there as it was.
He crept around the corner of the isle and peeked down into it. His breath caught in his chest, his heart stuttering. The pile of files he held slipped out of his grip, hitting the ground.
At the sound, the figure at the end of the row startled and turned.
There was the jumper, the curls, the freckles on a pale, drawn face. Martin Blackwood still existed. Jon could see him with his own eyes.