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Tim doesn't know whether to laugh or cry when he finds Danny's old jumper, buried at the back of the bottom drawer of his dresser. It’s a nice one, a deep, rich blue cable knit with only some slight fraying at the cuffs. Tim remembers he used to see Danny wear this one all the time, stolen from a university boyfriend; then one day he stopped, replacing it with hoodies splashed with band logos and jackets with an excess number of pockets. He doesn’t remember when Danny might have left it here, or how it ended up in his drawer.
Tim pulls the jumper out and buries his face in it, the wool pleasantly scratchy against his skin. It doesn’t smell like Danny—doesn’t smell like anything much, except dry wool and the slight mustiness of dresser drawers. But Tim clings tight to it anyway, pressing it so close to his face that he knows it will leave an imprint of its pattern in his skin. Just this simple act of contact, touching something that Danny touched, that he wore and loved and kept close, does something strange to Tim's chest, opening up the hole inside him that Danny left, simultaneously reminding him of that emptiness and filling it, just a little bit.
It's only when he pulls it away and sees the dark, damp patches soaked into the wool that he realizes he's been crying.
He doesn't put the jumper back in the drawer. He takes to wearing it whenever he is home, long after it’s really become too warm for layers. It helps, having this one piece of his brother close to his chest, wrapped around him just like one of Danny’s too-tight hugs.
The night of Prentiss's attack, Tim returns home to his empty flat, aching and exhausted, the holes the worms burrowed into him itching and burning under his bandages. He turns on every light in the place—he knows, intellectually, that Prentiss is dead, but he can't stop thinking about Martin trapped in his flat, can't stop himself checking the corners for flashes of silver.
He pulls Danny's jumper from where he left it draped over the couch that morning—it feels like a million years ago, the morning, when the worst thing he thought might happen was missing the train—and wraps himself in it, the familiar feel of it loosening the tightness in his chest just a little, even as an ache rises in the back of his throat.
He wishes Danny were here.
Tim curls up on the couch and wraps his arms as tight around himself as his wounds will let him. He buries his face in the soft wool of the jumper and tries to think of nothing at all.
He barely makes it through his first day back at work.
The worms are long gone, the Archives cleaned and sterilized and tidied, no evidence at all of the chaos and terror of that day. But Tim can feel it: in the careful, gentle way Martin greets him, in the strange new distance in Sasha’s eyes when she looks at him, in the slight tremor in Jon’s voice when he welcomes him back.
He sits down at his desk, flipping through the small pile of statements Sasha hands off to him, and he wonders how in the world they are supposed to continue working as though nothing is wrong, continue recording and researching and filing as though they have not all received confirmation that the horrors they’re reading about are real.
Not that Tim needed that confirmation. He’s known it was real for years. He’s not sure why Prentiss’s attack should make him feel any different. Maybe it’s that he can no longer pretend that the circus was some sort of isolated incident, a horrible blip in an otherwise normal world. The world is full of horrors, of worm-ridden women and circus clowns who will flay you alive and wear your skin like a suit, and Tim no longer has the luxury of telling himself that the monsters are few and far between.
This is his life now, a life of darkness and horrors and creeping, ever-present fear, and being back in the Archives just seems to emphasize how much he can’t escape it.
Tim puts his head in his hands. He doesn’t read any statements that day, does no follow-up or research. He just sits at his desk and tries to keep himself from screaming.
The next day, he decides to wear Danny's jumper to work, and to hell with the dress code.
Sasha and Martin don’t seem to notice the jumper—or at least they don't comment. Jon is nowhere to be seen, having already closed himself up in his office before Tim even arrived. Tim finds he's grateful to avoid that particular conversation, at least for now.
And it does help, a little.
He pulls the cuffs up over his hands as he works, leaning his face against his palm so he can feel the fabric against his cheek, and he is able to actually work through several statements over the course of the morning.
Jon doesn’t make an appearance until past lunchtime. Martin and Sasha are still out, so Tim is alone when Jon slopes out of his office, head down and shoulders hunched, like he’s hoping if he makes himself small enough he can escape all notice, become invisible. The posture stirs up a hot anger in the pit of Tim’s stomach. Tim wouldn’t even be down here at all if it weren’t for Jon, if Jon hadn’t asked him to come. And now Jon’s walking around the office like someone might attack him at any moment, flinching at shadows or if anyone gets close to him, hiding from Tim like he’s not even his friend, just one more thing to be feared. He’s the only one who might understand what Tim is feeling right now, and he won’t even look at him—
Tim huffs a frustrated sigh through his nose, and Jon looks up and stops dead. It takes a second for Tim to realize that it’s not his face Jon is staring at—it’s his jumper. Then Jon meets his eyes, and Tim stares right back at him, challenging. He waits for Jon to say something about unprofessional dress, for his face to twist into that familiar look of disdain that Tim knows is a mask but still somehow manages to hit somewhere deep inside him.
But Jon doesn’t scoff, or roll his eyes, or say anything about the dress code. He just stands there, frozen, staring at Tim’s jumper, his hands fisted around into the hem of his shirt. He doesn’t look angry or disdainful, he looks...the only word that comes to mind is devastated . His mouth is slightly open, as though he wanted to say something but the words got lost on the way to his lips, and his eyes are wide and—the angry pit in Tim’s stomach turns to ice as he realizes there are tears in Jon’s eyes.
Tim has never seen Jon cry. Even when they were in quarantine after Prentiss, addled with painkillers and the aftermath of terror, he had remained stubbornly dry-eyed. Now he looks like he’s only just holding back from crumpling in on himself like wet tissue paper.
Tim thinks he should say something, ask what’s wrong, but before he can react, before he can say anything at all, Jon presses his lips into a tight, firm line, spins on his heel and retreats back to his office. Tim is left sitting in the empty outer office, staring at the spot where Jon was standing.
What?
Jon doesn’t want to leave his office.
It’s Tim’s second day back, and Jon can feel his presence in the outside office like a weight. He should be happy to have Tim back at work, he thinks, should be happy that he is healthy and recovered—as much as any of them can be, anyway. He should be happy to have his friend around, and even more, to have someone around who understands what it feels like, who doesn’t look at him with pity and slight revulsion when they see his scars.
He should be happy, or at least relieved.
But how can he be, when he doesn’t know who to trust?
Jon knows that someone in the Institute killed Gertrude, and beyond that he knows nothing. He doesn’t know if what Tim told him about how he found the tunnels is true. He doesn’t know if Martin really stumbled across Gertrude’s body by accident. He doesn’t know if Sasha really only ran out of the Archives in order to get help.
He doesn’t know, and that not knowing gnaws at him, a sick twisting in his gut and itching at the back of his mind that will not let him rest or relax, even for a moment. In his office, away from the others, the feeling lessens slightly, and so he stays. He goes through the statements that he has stockpiled on his desk, one after the other, barely pausing between them. When he is reading statements, he is not thinking about what the others might be doing.
But his breakneck pace means that in too short a time he has run through all the statements on his desk and in his drawers and stacked on the chair by the door. He needs a distraction, something to keep his mind off the endless circling questions in his head. So he resigns himself to leaving his office briefly, to go get some more.
He listens for a moment before he opens the door. The outer office is quiet—maybe the others are all out to lunch. He ducks out, keeping his head down, hoping that if anyone is there, that they’ll take the hint and let him be.
Then Jon hears a frustrated huff of breath from the direction of the desks, and he looks up before he can think about it and freezes.
Tim is sitting at his desk. Jon is still not used to the new patterning of scars that pepper the sides of his face and his neck, but it is not the scars that stop Jon dead in his tracks.
It’s the jumper Tim’s wearing.
Danny’s jumper.
Jon’s old jumper. The one Danny used to steal every time he came over until Jon finally told him he should just keep it, as it was clear Jon was never going to get to wear it again.
The one he had once let slip that he liked seeing Danny in because it was the same color as his eyes, and Danny had laughed and taken his hand and pulled him into a tight hug as he stuttered around the sentence, cheeks burning.
The one Danny had been wearing the first time they kissed, curled up on the ratty futon in Jon’s student flat.
The one he carefully hadn’t worn when they sat on a park bench, fingers loosely linked together, and decided gently, sadly, that this wasn’t going to work.
Jon has never talked to Tim about Danny. When he first heard he’d gone missing, several years out of university, he’d thought about getting in contact with the family but had quickly decided against it—it had been years since they dated, and they’d never been that serious to begin with, and who was he, anyway, to intrude on their grief with his own sad little connection? He’d watched the news religiously, checked all the papers, anywhere information about Danny’s case might turn up. But nothing ever did, and Jon eventually resigned himself to the fact that he would never know what happened.
Then Tim joined the Research team at the Institute, and Jon had stopped breathing the first time he walked in: a slightly taller, broader, fairer version of Danny. There had been no mistaking him. Jon had known he was staring but hadn’t been able to make himself stop, every ounce of his will focused on just keeping himself from crying.
He still doesn’t know what Tim made of his staring, that first day. But he was kind, and played it off, and only teased Jon a little about his initial awkwardness. Between Tim’s obsession with architecture and Robert Smirke and Jon’s curiosity about any and all topics and tendency to infodump to anyone who would sit still to listen, they became fast friends, one of the first real friends Jon had had since uni.
But Jon never mentioned Danny.
He hadn’t known how to bring it up, at first, and then the longer it went, the stranger it felt to say something. What would he say, anyway? Oh, by the way, I dated your brother in uni and I still have nightmares sometimes about what could have happened to him, did you ever find out what it was?
No. He never wanted to bring up what he was sure would be a painful topic for Tim. So he said nothing.
And now he’s standing here, staring like an idiot once more, this time at a jumper he thought he’d never see again, and Tim has no idea why he would be reacting like this so what must he be thinking? Jon can feel a burning lump growing in his throat and tears pricking at his eyes, and the last thing he wants to do right now is cry in front of Tim; he has to hang on to what few shreds of his dignity remain.
He presses his lips hard together and retreats back to his office as quickly as he can, statements forgotten.
He barely manages to make it inside before the pressure building inside his chest forces its way out in a sob so loud that he claps his hand over his mouth, hoping that Tim didn’t hear.
It’s not just about Danny. He knows it’s not just about Danny. It’s everything: Prentiss and the statements and Gertrude, the pervasive feeling he gets in the Archives that someone is watching him, judging him. The nightmares he’s been getting and the fact that he hasn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in months, that he’s just so, so tired. It’s all come to a head and now this, this reminder of yet another person he’s lost, yet another mystery he will never get to solve—it’s all too much. He thinks of Danny’s bright, loud laugh, and the way he used to smile at Jon after they kissed, hair rumpled and eyes sparkling, and he thinks about how Danny could be moldering away now in some room somewhere just like Gertrude, and no one might ever find him—
Jon sits down hard in his chair, pressing his hand tight to his mouth as another sob shakes him. He pulls his knees to his chest, squeezes his eyes shut as he tries to think of anything else, to erase that horrible image from his mind.
But it's no good. The thought is burned into his brain like one of his nightmares and all he can do is bury his head in his arms and try to stay quiet as the tears roll down his cheeks.
Tim sits at his desk, still staring at the space where Jon had been, trying to work out what it was about the sight of him—the sight of his jumper?—that had set Jon off so badly.
He has almost decided to leave it alone, that it’s none of his business and he just needs to let it go, when he hears a quiet sob from behind Jon’s closed door.
Oh, god.
Tim sits frozen, listening hard. For a moment, it’s silent, no sound at all but the ticking of the clock on the wall above Tim’s head.
Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe Jon just moved his chair and it sounded like someone crying. He doesn’t have to butt in when Jon so clearly doesn’t want to be around him; he doesn’t have to interfere. Maybe—
Another pained sound comes from behind the door, muffled this time, like Jon’s holding his hands over his mouth to try to keep quiet, and Tim is standing before he can really think about it.
Fuck it. He doesn’t care how jumpy Jon’s been since he got back, how clearly afraid of all of them he is. He can’t just sit here and listen to him cry alone in his office.
He knocks quietly with one knuckle on Jon’s door, making sure to make it a quick tap-tap-tap rather than a slow, deliberate knock. He doesn’t know why, but Jon always startles badly at knocks like that, and the last thing he needs right now is to frighten him more.
There is no response when he knocks, although the quiet, hitched breathing stops at the sound and there is absolute silence on the other side.
Tim waits a moment, then knocks again before opening the door just enough to poke his head inside.
“Jon?”
There’s a small, choked gasp and a scrambling as he opens the door, and by the time Tim peers around it, Jon is seated at his desk, his back too straight. He’s fumbling his glasses back onto his face, his cheeks still shining a little with tears he has tried to hastily swipe away.
“Tim. Hello. Did—did you need something?”
Tim can’t help but smile sadly at the way Jon tries to force his voice steady, the way he pitches it a little deeper when he’s trying to sound professional and hide how he’s really feeling.
“Just wanted to check on you,” he says. “You...well, you ran away pretty quick, out there.”
“Ah. Yes.” Jon looks down at his hands, twisted in his lap. He seems to want to look anywhere but at Tim. “Sorry about that. I just…”
He trails off. He’s holding one hand tightly in the other and digging his thumb deep into his opposite palm over and over, a compulsive scrubbing motion that Tim knows will leave marks if he keeps it up. He hasn’t seen Jon this outwardly anxious in a long time; since they moved to the Archives, he’s closed off that part of himself, trying to seem professional, capable.
Suddenly, he seems much closer to the man Tim met in research, anxious and eager to talk to anyone who would listen about the things he was learning. Tim’s friend. The remains of his anger blow out like a candle, and he is left with only a dull heartache at how small and lost Jon looks, sitting too-straight in his chair.
Tim hesitates, then pulls the chair from the far side of the desk around and sets it next to Jon’s far enough away so they won’t touch, but close enough that they can reach across and bridge the gap. He sits, slowly. Jon is still scrubbing at his hands, studiously not looking at Tim, and Tim reaches over and gently covers Jon’s hands with one of his own to stop the motion. Jon stiffens at the contact, and Tim thinks for a second that he's going to jerk his hands away. But he doesn't.
“Jon," Tim says softly. "You can talk to me.”
Jon sniffs. Tim is afraid for a moment that he is going to collapse right then and there. But instead he just laughs, a sad little sound.
“You sound like Martin.”
Tim smiles. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
He gives Jon’s hands a slight squeeze before leaning back in the chair, giving him some space to breathe. For a moment they just sit, not talking, the silence broken by an occasional sniff from Jon. Tim waits, quietly, giving Jon the time and space to collect his thoughts.
“It was your jumper,” Jon says finally, and Tim tilts his head in confusion. “I...the last time I saw it, well...the last time I saw it, Danny was wearing it.”
Tim freezes. He’s not sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t that. He’s barely talked to anyone about Danny, and all this time Jon's known about him? Jon had known him, at some point, and he never said anything. Why had he never said anything?
Something of what he’s feeling must show on his face, because Jon immediately looks stricken and starts to stammer apologies.
“I’m—I’m sorry, Tim, I’m sure you don’t want—we don’t have to talk about it, I’ll just—”
Tim shakes his head. “No—no, it’s okay. I was just surprised, is all. You—you knew Danny?”
Jon nods. “At university.”
“You never said.”
“I know. I—it never seemed like the right time. I didn’t...I didn’t want to hurt you by bringing him up.”
Oh, Jon .
Tim had forgotten about this side of Jon—how he can be so careful of others, sometimes, so worried about how the things he says might come across. He’s buried this part of himself since the promotion, Tim thinks. He hadn’t realized how much he missed it.
He thinks about how Jon stared at him the first time they met, when he joined Research, and how Jon stared at his jumper in the outer office just now, and many things begin to make sense.
"So when you saw this…?"
Jon nods. "It, um...it took me by surprise. We—we dated, for a little while, and he always liked to steal that one when he came over, so it...”
Jon trails off again, and Tim’s head spins as his entire world re-aligns and the pieces fall into place in his head.
I’m going out with Jon tonight, some of his friends are playing a gig. Jon showed me this documentary about cave-diving, fascinating stuff. You have to listen to this band, Jon showed them to me, they’re really great. Oh, I can’t tonight, Jon’s coming over to mine.
“No way. Wait—Jon-from-uni? You’re Jon-from-uni?”
Jon shrugs, looking up at Tim with a watery smile. “I suppose so.”
“No shit! Oh my god.” Tim can’t help letting a single, surprised laugh. Jon jumps a little at the sound. “I can’t believe it. Danny never used to shut up about you.”
Jon looks surprised. “Really?”
“I’m not kidding. Jon this, Jon that. Constant . It got almost a bit annoying, to be honest. No offense.”
Jon’s lips twitch a little at that—just the ghost of a smile, but Tim will take it as a victory. “None taken.”
Then the smile fades and he looks back down at his hands, clenched white-knuckled now in his lap.
“Tim, did...you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but...did you ever find out what happened?”
Tim stiffens. For a moment, his mind flashes images one after the other, Covent Garden Theatre, dusty passages, a darkened stage with a single spotlight and Danny standing in the center of it, the grin on Grimaldi’s face as he reached for Danny’s arm and pulled —
“Tim?”
He gasps, his eyes flying open at the feel of Jon’s hand on his arm. He hadn’t even realized he closed them. Jon is looking at him with eyes full of concern and remorse and god, it’s just so good to see something other than fear in Jon’s face, to be able to actually look at him without his eyes skittering away, that it takes a second for Tim to parse what he’s actually saying.
“Are you all right?”
Tim swallows, presses a hand over his suddenly rabbiting heart. “Yeah, I—I’m fine.”
“I’m sorry,” Jon says. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No, it—it’s okay.” Tim closes his eyes again, takes a deep breath. “I—we—I do know what happened. More or less. It’s not...I don’t think I can talk about it right now. But it's...it’s the reason I’m here. At the Institute.”
Jon's eyes widen. "Oh. Oh, god, I…"
“Yeah.”
Telling Jon feels different from telling Sasha. Telling her had been a relief—being able to talk about it with someone who wouldn’t just dismiss the idea of the Circus out of hand—but there had still been a distance to it. She could be sympathetic, but she couldn’t know how he felt. Not really.
Jon, though—Tim can tell by the look on his face that Jon knows.
He hasn’t been able to talk about what happened—what really happened—to Danny with someone who knew him, who understands the hole Danny’s loss left in Tim’s world. It lifts a weight Tim hadn’t even realized has been sitting on his chest, and he drops his head in his hands, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes. He doesn’t want to cry, not now, and so he just sits, hands pressed to his eyes, and waits for the feeling to pass.
After a moment, he feels a tentative hand on his shoulder, so light it’s barely there. When Tim doesn’t pull away, Jon lets his hand settle, a steady, comforting weight.
“I’m sorry, Tim. I’m so sorry.”
They sit like that for a while. Jon runs his fingers along the cables of the jumper in a gentle, repetitive motion and Tim wonders if he's thinking about Danny as he does it, if the physical history of the thing comforts him the same way it comforts Tim.
Eventually, Tim takes a deep breath and sits up.
“God. We’re a mess,” he says. He leans back and scrubs his hands over his face. Jon lets his hand fall away, and when Tim looks up at him he’s regarding him with a complicated look on his face.
He makes a face back. "What?"
Jon shakes his head. "Nothing. I just..." he trails off, waving his hand in a vague gesture, like he hopes their surroundings will provide an end to his sentence that he can't articulate.
Tim thinks he knows what he means. "I know. It's all gone to shit, hasn't it?"
Jon’s laugh is a harsh sound, a short, clipped thing with no real humor in it at all. "That...is certainly one way of putting it," he says, and his voice wobbles with some suppressed emotion—tears or laughter, Tim isn’t sure.
Jon lets out a deep, shuddering breath, a release of tension that has been building for days—weeks—months.
“I really am sorry, Tim. Not just about Danny. I…” He bites his lip, clearly trying to put his words in order. “All of this, the Archives, Prentiss—you never would have been here if it weren’t for me, and I just...I’m so sorry. I never—if I had known—”
“How could you have known? It’s not like there’s a sign over the Archives door saying, ‘here there be monsters.’”
“But I knew—I’ve always known that at least some of this was real, and I pulled you in anyway, I didn’t even think—” He closes his eyes. “I could have lost you—any one of you, that day, and it’s all my fault.”
The words hit Tim like a blow, and a sick feeling of shame sweeps through him.
Because the thing is, in his heart, he has been blaming Jon. In his weeks alone in his flat, bored stiff and trying to distract himself from itching at his bandages, he had thought a lot about how he had ended up here, how his life could have gone so wrong. And Jon’s promotion and the move to the Archives had been...an easy target. A convenient scapegoat, someone to blame. If Jon had never asked him to join him in this godforsaken basement, he would still be happily ensconced in Research, digging for mentions of Smirke and Grimaldi’s circus, mourning Danny and nursing his private hurts and revenges without having to worry about flesh-eating worms or murdered bosses or mysterious mazes of tunnels that raised as many questions as they answered.
He had sat in his flat, letting his resentment of Jon build and build until he had convinced himself that everything that had been going wrong the past few months could be laid at his door. And when he came back and Jon hid himself in his office, barely speaking to him at all that first day, it felt like all his feelings were being confirmed.
But today, seeing Jon without any masks, how he is just as hurt and as frightened as any of them—talking to him about Danny—he can’t keep hold of the anger, even if part of him might want to.
Tim leans forward, elbows on his knees, so he can look up into Jon’s face where he’s curled in on himself.
“Hey. Jon. Look at me.”
Jon does, and his eyes are reddened and shining with unshed tears, and Tim can't get over just how tired he looks.
“This isn’t your fault, all right? You didn’t force any of us to come here. You asked, and we said yes. It was a choice, our choice. And god, I wish we’d all chosen different, but—but it’s not on you.”
Jon blinks at him, and a couple stray tears streak down his cheeks.
“But I—”
Tim shakes his head firmly. “Nope, no more excuses. We’re in this together, Jon.” Then he softens, and reaches out to place his hand over Jon’s again. “You don’t have to hide from us.”
Jon’s breath hitches.
“I don’t mean to,” he whispers. “I don’t want to. But I—I’m so afraid. All the time. What happened to Gertrude—that—that wasn’t a monster or some supernatural being, that was a person . What if—what if I’m next?”
The anger rises in Tim again, not at Jon this time, but at this place, at whoever killed Gertrude, at everything that has brought them here, put that fear in Jon that makes him shrink in on himself. He squeezes Jon’s hand tightly.
"That's not going to happen,” he says. “We won't let it. Me, Martin, Sasha—we have your back. I may wish you'd never asked us down here, but I'm not about to let some spooky murderer kill you over it."
Jon opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, then snaps it shut again and just nods mutely.
They are silent for a while, after that. What else is there to say?
Finally, Tim straightens.
“Have you eaten?”
Jon gives him a deadpan look. “What do you think?”
And Tim laughs at that, a real laugh that he can feel in his chest. It feels wonderful to do something as mundane as laughing about Jon’s terrible eating habits. To have a problem that has an easy, everyday solution. He stands, holding out his hand to Jon.
“Come on, boss. Let’s go get some food and sunshine.”
Jon hesitates, just for a moment. Then he nods, takes Tim’s hand, and lets him pull him to his feet.
Jon follows Tim up and out of the Archives and through the echoing marble lobby of the Institute.
A tiny part of him is still trying to whisper that this could all be some ruse, some trick, that Tim is not to be trusted, that no one is safe.
But as soon as Tim had touched him, had reached out and gently placed his hands over Jon’s to still his anxious fidgets, the itch in the back of his mind had calmed, and his thoughts had stilled from their endless carousel.
And then Tim told him about Danny, the terrible reason that Tim is here at all—and Jon watched as he fought so hard to stay composed and knew that there was no trick here, no deception.
Tim is still Tim, still the person who befriended Jon back in research. Danny’s brother. Jon’s friend. And when he took Jon’s hand and promised to have his back, to defend him from whatever—whoever—is lurking in the Institute, Jon believed him.
The world is full of horrors and things lurking in the dark, but Tim is not one of them, and this knowledge unknots something deep inside Jon’s chest.
He still needs to find out who killed Gertrude. But it will be so much easier with someone like Tim at his side.
They step out together into the bustling London street, the late summer heat hitting them like a wall. Jon closes his eyes for a moment, relishing the feeling of the sun on his face. When he opens his eyes Tim is looking down at him with a small smile playing on his lips.
“What?”
Tim shakes his head. “Nothing. I just...you and Danny. I can see it.”
Jon smiles back and ducks his head. And he and Tim walk down the road together in search of lunch.