on the ashes in my wake

by hazelnut_chai

Summary:

The red head of the match glances off the box in a clumsy strike and is instantly alight. There is nothing interesting about the fire, really, other than the fact that Jon created it.

--

Or, Jon used fire to deal with Mister Spider when he was eight years old, and the Desolation has clung to him ever since.

Chapter 1: Kindling

Anyone who preaches the innocence of children is yet to meet Jon.

As a baby, he screamed and screamed and screamed until his lungs must have been fit to burst, and only seemed to settle when his parents were on the brink of tears. It did not make them bad parents to be exhausted or frustrated with his behaviour; they were exhausted and frustrated, yes, but never neglectful. They took him to the doctor’s, worried something was wrong to make him scream so. He received a clean bill of health and congratulations on his exceptionally health lungs.

As a baby, he took to crawling, walking, and running with ease, spurred on by the worried cries that followed in his wake and reached a crescendo when he hid. The endless fear that he had fallen into the lake, or crossed a busy street, or fallen, or been taken, always dispelled when they found him sitting nearby and watching, his eyes big as saucers. That did not make his parents any less fearful.

His grandmother tolerated it less, when the time came to take care of him. Leash backpacks were a staple of his wardrobe once he went to live with her.

By her admission, he was a difficult child, a fact that did not lesson as he turned eight or so. She would say it with the resigned tact that old women carry. It was a clear stand-in for he’s a little shit, and anyone who heard it would nod sympathetically.

At eight (or so,) he has no friends to call his own and seems very content with this. They can’t pick on him for being too smart if they’re too scared to get near him in the first place. Not that Jon is particularly scary in any given moment – he is only eight years old, after all – but his corrosive comments were quick to wear people down, and the sting of those comments kept kids his age away.

Sometimes, his classmates almost seemed to like him. It mostly happened when they had a substitute teacher, the less experienced the better, who was stammering over a hastily left teaching plan for the day. Misspellings on the board, mathematical errors, trivial facts incorrectly recalled – Jon’s voice would chime up, pointing them out in an instant.

“That isn’t the order Ms Green taught us to do maths in. Are you sure you’re really a teacher?”

“It’s t-h-e-y-apostrophe-r-e for they are, not their. Yes, I’m sure. That’s what the apostrophe is for.”

“You’re not allowed to keep us in for recess. I’ll tell the principal.”

“Where did you learn to teach? Okay! I’ll remember not to go there if I want to be a teacher.”

The first few were always laughed off, or thanked, but they piled up. They grated.

So his classmates liked him when he made teachers leave the classroom in tears. They did not like him the rest of the time.

The kids his age keep away because they’re a little bit scared, but the older siblings of those kids? They have no trouble getting close enough to pick on him. They aren’t nearly as scared, after all. They’re older, stronger, thicker skinned, and know how to string curse words and insults together in ways he hasn’t quite mastered yet. But they don’t really count, because he doesn’t spend much time with them, since they’re not at the same school. He only has to put up with them when his grandmother sends him outside to play.

In fact, at his school, the only person who tolerates him is the librarian. This is probably only because Jon respects the library’s rule. And this is probably only because he knows that if he doesn’t follow the being quiet rule, he can’t read the books, and how else is he supposed to spend his time when he doesn’t have many friends?

Jon enjoys reading out of necessity. There are only so many things a child can do to occupy themselves, even now that backpack leashes have been phased out of his wardrobe, and so many less for a child who insists on burning all their bridges. Boardgames and sports and playdates are all firmly struck off the list of options for requiring other people. Riding his bike around is too sweaty, and drawing needs too much practice, and his grandmother doesn’t like it when he watches the telly too much. So, reading.

There’s a lot to learn from reading, Jon quickly finds, which is perhaps the only saving grace for books in his eyes. Fiction books teach him some pop-culture references that certainly give context to some of the bullying older kids subject him to. Non-fiction books are brimming with pure facts, though, fun titbits and trivia that he absorbs like a sponge.

The problem with reading is that he doesn’t like rereading. The facts don’t change when he looks at them again! The stories won’t magically unfurl in a different way this time! Rereading is an awful waste of time and Jon absolutely refuses to do it.

So his grandmother buys him stacks upon stacks of books, cheap ones from charity shops and libraries clearing out their stock, anything she can get without breaking the bank. It is certainly a matter of quantity over quality. Encyclopaedias and picture books are equally as likely to wind up in his hands – and to be read, if his grandmother doesn’t replenish his stocks, forcing him to crack the spine or go bored.

He complains loudly, though. Sometimes loud enough to be sent outside – though, he takes the book with him, because otherwise he might have to play outside, and that would be just awful.

That’s how he ends up at the park with A Guest for Mister Spider. There’s no way he’d read it otherwise, the thick cardboard pages clearly meant for someone less dexterous than him, the pictures for someone younger, the big font for someone less well read. Despite clearing being a children’s book, it has a nameplate on the inside. Jurgen Leitner must be very proud of his advanced reading level.

Jon rolls his eyes, trudges toward a park bench, and sits down. He begins to read.

Despite his reservations, Jon finds it impossible to look away from the pages once he starts reading. The world shrinks to the drab illustrations and the short, simple sentences. It takes an eternity to read a page, engrossed as he is. It takes an instant. He has to get to the next page.

He can’t stop reading. Even though he’s well past having to mouth the words to understand them his lips form the shapes, his fingers trace the letters, everything in his being going toward reading the book. He would be offended by the idea that he is a small child again needing help to read, a guiding hand, but there is no space in his mind for anything but Mister Spider and his guests.

Or, he thought he was sitting down? He certainly isn’t when one of the older kids knocks the book out of his hand. He isn’t sure where he is, now, but that’s pressing than getting the book back.

“I was reading that!” Jon snaps, reaching for the book now held above his head. He needs to finish reading. He needs to.

“Does the baby want his baby book back?” The older kid sneers. His free hand shoves at Jon’s face, holding him away as he looks at the book. He tone turns mocking as he reads the title from the inside page. “A Guest for Mister Spider.”

The sneer slips off of his face by millimetres, the childish tone tapering into silence as he eyes scan over the images and words, flickering over page, taking in information from as many points as possible before moving to the next page.

As he moves to the next page, so do his legs begin to move, strange, jarring motions even for the gangly limbs of a teen. The older kid holds the book out of Jon’s reach as he reads and walks and Jon follows, jumping for the book that moves to evade his grasping hands, desperate to get it back.

It can’t be a long book, but the bully never takes his attention away from its pages and his legs move in those unnatural movements for as long as he reads, and Jon follows. The park is far behind them, navigating through backstreets and alleys even as streetlights flicker on to combat the darkening sky.

Still Jon tries to get the book back. Still it is kept from him.

Jon’s legs are too tired to ache by the time they stop in front of a house. He assumes it is a house – it has a door, and a wall for the door to be set in – but he is only focused on getting the book back. The older kid stops moving in front of the door, save for spasms that shoot through his body, and Jon fumes.

“Give it back!” He cries. The older kid ignores him. He knocks on the door.

The door opens and the two long, thin, hairy legs that reach forward have no intent of giving anything back.

They take the older kid.

In the weeks that follow the older kid’s disappearance, Jon spends more and more time in the library. He does not read any more books that his grandmother buys him without first checking for the name plate. He reaches several conclusions, which become absolute in only the way that a child’s convictions can be.

The first is that Mister Spider took his bully so he could eat him. The long legs had been just like those illustrated in the book, dark and bulbous from previous feedings and greed. Had the door opened any further, there would have been six more legs waiting for him. They did not have to wait long for his bully.

The second is that he was almost Mister Spider’s meal. This conclusion arrives quickly after the first. If he had reached the end of the book he would have been standing in front of the door, and then sitting in Mister Spider’s belly. This is the only time that Jon is grateful he isn’t a particularly quick reader.

Third is that he is now terrified of spiders. This is not so much a conclusion Jon came to himself as much as one which was suddenly present in his mind, as irrefutable as gravity. Cobwebs in corners placed a heavy pit in his stomach; the mere presence of a spider in a room was enough to send Jon out of it.

Finally, he decides that he has to kill Mister Spider.

His time in the library is spent researching what can kill spiders. He shakes a little whenever a picture of a spider shows up in a book, pulse spiking, hands gripping the book tighter, but he perseveres. He learns that quite a few animals eat spiders – birds, lizards, wasps, monkeys, and assorted creepy crawlies.

He imagines himself with a sharp beak, pecking at Mister Spider’s fat body until all his guests and guts come spilling out. Or with a curling tail of strong, shining segments, ending in a wicked stinger perfect for spearing through Mister Spider.

Jon knows birds and monkeys are too small to kill him.

His research turns to things that can kill people, or people-sized spiders in a pinch. It includes medieval torture methods (his librarian quickly intervenes in this topic), war and its machines, and, finally, violent crimes in the modern age.

Arson seems very sensible. He wouldn’t have to be too close to Mister Spider to kill him, unlike with guns and swords and such, the equipment should be easy to get, and, at the very least, he could make sure Mister Spider does not have a home to receive guests in.

He has to find the house before he can burn it down. The thought comes to him as easily as the idea of arson did, and settles in his mind. It takes him a few weeks to find it, the directions to and appearance of the house largely forgotten in the obsession that had lead him to it and the fear that had chased him away from it.

But there’s a street sign his eyes always skim over, a road that he can’t quite make his head turn down, like someone is holding his face between their palms and turning his attention away. Gooseflesh flocks to his arms and neck when he passes it. It takes so much effort to walk down that street, but it was the only one he hasn’t checked yet.

Once he finds the street, it’s easy to recognise the door and the house it belongs to.

Jon steals the pack of matches from the kitchen draw early one Friday before he has to go to school, before even the sun has fully crested the horizon and begun its sleepy ascent. The walk to the house is peaceful, birdsong and his footsteps the only sounds, the drivers that would be filling the roads still getting ready for the day. It’s a perfectly lovely morning about to be made even lovelier by the death of Mister Spider.

When Jon reaches the house, a thin film of sweat covers him. He doesn’t think about whether it’s from the long walk or the fear. He wipes his palms on his shirt, and they leave behind a strong, strange smell, like he’s waiting in the car while his grandmother fills the tank with petrol. He finds he doesn’t mind.

Jon pulls the matchbox and a handful of kindling one of the library books had recommended and kneels. He sets the kindling by the door frame and pulls on the straps of his bag, making sure it’s secure, preparing himself to run to school as soon as he is done here. He slides the sleeve of the box along, revealing the matches, and picks one out. Slots the sleeve back into place.

He hasn’t used a match before. His grandmother won’t let him; part of being a child, troublesome or otherwise, is not being trusted with fire. But he’s seen her light candles before and understands the basic mechanisms.

The red head of the match glances off the box in a clumsy strike and is instantly alight. There is nothing interesting about the fire, really, other than the fact that he created it.

He sets the match on the kindling and leaves.

After school that day, his grandmother lets him watch the news on the telly with her. A burnt down house is the headline.

Chapter 2: Spark

Notes:

CW: Desolation-typical junk, and non-consensual branding (to skip, stop reading at He holds out his hand and see end notes for summary)

As a teenager, when Jon’s teachers aren’t trying to tactfully call him unnerving, they commend his work ethic and attention to detail. Some of the more disagreeable teachers add a snide comment about his achievements being hindered by all his sick days and poor health, the ableist pricks. Regardless, he consistently places among the top in his classes, particularly English, History, and Science.

While Jon doesn’t enjoy rereading texts as he has to for English, it requires very little effort from him. Even Shakespeare, Ray Bradbury, Sylvia Plath, and endless other authors of different branches of literature use the same structures and concepts that Jon had been reading since he was a child. Identifying techniques and conventions and genre and meaning are easy when you recognise the patterns, and Jon had been passively learning them for years.

History holds his attention in ways he had never imagined it would. What drives countries to war? What are people willing to lose over political spats? How do those losses impact the modern day? So much potential went up in smoke when so many civilisations were snuffed out like candles. The Library of Alexandria alone was a fascinating example.

If he ever finds the library of Jurgen Leitner, it will meet the same fate.

Science is a jewel of a subject, its many facets making a whole, brilliant thing that Jon so admires. Engineering is learning how things were created, building perfect blueprints for how to create and then tear something apart. Biology is much the same but applied to humans – what brain injuries could perfectly remove a particular functionality, what systems could be sabotaged without killing someone, what substances could make someone destroy their own life, were all perfectly capable of being extrapolated from classes and textbooks when it wasn’t explicitly imparted. It’s all such fascinating information.

Chemistry, of course, holds his heart most dearly. Though the other sciences also spoke of demolition intellectually, and Jon knows that his younger self would have appreciated such options to destroy Mister Spider, chemistry is the beating heart of destruction.

At a molecular level, it’s possible to destroy something so thoroughly as to be completely unrecognisable. Its energy may live on through pesky laws of conservation, yes, but the original thing is gone, changed into something new, those precise atoms and molecules and electrons never to be in the exact same configuration even if they were to reunite. To dissolve a thing in acid, neutralise it, and drink the resulting water with satisfaction, knowing that it is forever removed from the existence it knew, is only possible with chemistry.

And the practical aspect of it; watching a light burn so bright that you hardly notice the burn beside the bright, the break down, the chaos beneath the mask of beauty. His other subjects never have any hope of comparing.

Jon enjoys learning the devastation of things. Relationships of all scales crumbling like salt, how an object can be unmade, even just what banter made a particular person stiffen before they laughed it off, called to him like nothing else quite could. There is so much to learn about destruction, and the school system, despite its many flaws, teaches much of it. The energy that had made him such a difficult child is effectively channelled into his studies, for the most part, to the relief of his grandmother, teachers, and peers.

The more he learns, the more he can intuit the simplest way to destroy something. It isn’t an altogether useful skill for school, but it helps him destress, the almost meditative nature of destroying something clearing his head and settling his stomach. It works more effectively to help Jon feel better than any of the medicines prescribed and tried by him, and infinitely more effectively than the doctors who simply told him his persistent nausea and headaches were from stress.

Besides his health, he also had to deal with the gasoline that seeps from his skin. His management of it has come a long way from when he was eight and unable to give a name to the scent. It’s as stubborn as smoke and lingers on his clothes, so he does laundry every second day to account for the many outfit changes, and wears copious amounts of deodorant, no different than his peers. It slicks his hair, lighting the black strands up in a yellow sheen under light, so he washes it more often.

He hasn’t tested if his gasoline sweat, for want of a better phrase, can be utilised for any of the standard uses.

Sometimes, he finds himself sitting with his stolen matchbox and a lit match in hand, wondering what would happen if he were to drop it in his lap. The logical part of his mind, the part that excels in academics, simply states that he would be on fire; a smaller part, a hungrier part, asks, and what else?

Jon never drops the match.

He's grown into his sharp tongue, or his peers have developed their own to counter it – either way, his acerbic comments don’t cut down those around him as much as they did when he was eight. He still lacks a distinct friend group, but people don’t actively avoid him. Well, not unless he’s given them a reason to.

One of the kids striving for some sport scholarship or other wouldn’t meet his eyes for a week after Jon sneered that her dreams were fragile things, reliant on her health as much as her skills. Did she know how common and ruinous ACL injuries were? How often broken bones caused lifelong troubles? The number of athletes who rushed back to practice on recovering wounds, made them worse, and never returned to play again? It would only take one bad fall.

At the end of that week, it did only take one bad fall.

Jon’s health was much improved while the former sports-scholarship-hopeful was on bedrest. It returned to the usual persistent stomach-ache, like a gnawing hunger that couldn’t be sated, and a headache that pressed itself against his temples.

Or, a student who shared a study group with Jon who stopped attending meetings and swapped out of any shared classes. They started avoiding Jon when he got tired of their persistent, grating, tone-deaf positivity and hissed that he knew why they were always so comfortable going into tests. It must be so relaxing to know what was on every test before it got handed out. Academic misconduct this late in their education would be a dark stain on their transcripts. Don’t they know universities won’t accept cheaters?

Again his health took a turn for the better, lasting as long as the slip in his ex-study-partner’s grades and confidence. Then hunger and pain returned.

There are some students that, try as he might, he can’t get close enough to snark at. Much like when he was a child trying to find Mr Spider’s house, something unseen fixes his head in position, sews his jaw shut, when the thought of being an ass crosses his mind. Jon can’t quite form a link between them. There’s no common thread: one with overly controlling parents, one that smokes and drinks already, one that keeps exotic pets, including tarantulas, if the rumours are to be believed. It frustrates him to no end.

Teachers pull him aside after his more scathing comments hit a loose-lipped victim, and ask him why he said what he said. His answer?

“I was just telling the truth.”

The wonderful thing about upper high politics is that pissing off one person almost always leads to appeasing another. Jon is never in the bad graces of too many people at once and, frankly, never suffers too many consequences for his actions. He has no close friends to be dropped by when his repulsive comments come to light; staff are hesitant to give him detention due to his excellent grades and having to spend time with him; his lack of reliance on social standing means he isn’t shaken by its fluctuations.

Still, he isn’t close enough to anyone to be given personalised invites to parties – no one is requesting Jonathan Sims by name to be at their party. But he isn’t distant enough to be explicitly excluded, either, and if word of a party makes its way to him, he’s likely to attend.

Not because he enjoys parties, mind you. Jon is every bit as unsociable as a teenager as he was a child. The loud music, close proximity, dancing, talking, kissing, drinking, partying of it all doesn’t appeal to him. But he does tend to feel better after a game of would you rather, which is what lures him to Jennifer Tailor’s birthday party late in the school year.

He arrives an hour or two after the party’s start, and instantly has to skirt around two people making out. He has an inkling that they aren’t dating each other, and that at least one of them is in a different, exclusive relationship, and he absently commits their names to memory, wishing he had a camera instead.

It doesn’t take long for him to find a game, and less time for him to situate himself in its loose circle. The questions are probably more interesting to those who aren’t sober. Would you rather be able to time travel or see into the future? Always buy more than you need, or always forget an item at the shops? Have an extra finger or an extra toe? End all wars or end world hunger? Jon answered with the majority when he answered at all, waiting, waiting, waiting for his turn to ask questions.

They start fairly innocent, more or less within the bounds of the previous questions, “Would you rather only listen to one song, or watch one movie?”

“Would you rather everyone believe a horrible lie about you, or know a terrible secret?”

One of the snogging people from when he arrived – Emmet Brown – confidently answers that he’d prefer people know a secret. “What do I have to hide?” We’ll see.

“Would you rather lose your sense of smell or touch?”

“Would you rather never being able to do your favourite hobby, or being able to do nothing else?”

“Would you rather lose all your friends or your family?”

By this point, the members of the group have switched in and out so many times that it was only practically, but not fundamentally, made of the same people, the party’s disappointing Theseus’ paradox. Chief among them was the party host herself, Jennifer. Most of them are at least a little bit drunk, but Jennifer is closer to sober than tipsy, present enough to carry out whatever duties hosts impose upon themselves. She’s the only one paying half as much attention to the game as Jon is, so he leans closer to give his last question. He isn’t too sure what it’ll be until he says it.

“Would you rather lose only your sentimental belongings in a housefire, or everything but them?”

Jennifer’s attention slides around the backyard the party is being held in, taking in the many, many belongings scattered around. The table tennis set. The outdoor tables and chairs. The potted plants. The windchimes. The tub of dog toys. The lounge chairs. The coolers. Countless other things that can’t be seen in the poor lighting. Countless more inside the house itself.

“Just my sentimental crap, I s’pose,” she says after a while, shrugging. The movement isn’t fluid. “It’d be selfish otherwise.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Jon says, and smiles. He sits through a few more rounds of would you rather before excusing himself. He goes inside.

With Jennifer’s answer buzzing in his mind, Jon finds it remarkably easy to pick out which items are hers and, more importantly, which she considers sentimental. There aren’t many in the main area of the house, though he does pick up a family picture and dig out a worn wooden spoon, but he follows the tug of a greater concentration of sentimental crap to her bedroom. Luckily, it’s unoccupied.

Jon sets the photo and spoon on the floor and begins gathering other items. An old baby’s blanket, a corny Valentine’s plush, bracelets, and more join the pile, his headache dissipating and stomach ache easing up with each item. As he works on opening a cheap safe, he tells himself that his health is more important than Jennifer having these items. She probably doesn’t even use them that often. He notices the splitting pain at his temples every day; he endures never ending hunger every waking second. If burning a few pieces of crap makes Jon feel better, that’s reason enough for them to burn.

The hungrier part of himself croons that he doesn’t need a reason.

The safe’s tumbler clicks into place with a soft, approving click, and Jon pulls it open. He’s glad he could crack the code – opening it this way should make it look like someone Jennifer trusts with the code opened it. Maybe she’ll burn that bridge herself. The idea makes not indulging in brute force worth it.

Jon grabs a fistful of heirloom jewellery and tosses it onto the pile. It gleams back at him like it’s in on the mischief.

It seems almost crude to use fire when he knows so much chemistry, but sometimes the classics are best.

The next few steps are almost automatic, they’re so well practiced: Jon fishes his stolen matchbox from his pocket, shakes out a match, strikes it, and places at the base of the pile, beside the items he handled the most. Yellow tongues are quick to lap along the photo and the spoon, chasing the thin film of gasoline that coats them. Jon watches as the fire climbs the pile, one item at a time, catching wherever there is enough heat and fuel and oxygen. It spits sparks at him, asking him to join, to burn, and it’s a struggle to keep himself away

He allows himself ten more seconds and begins counting them down in his head. He wants to stay and watch the fire truly catch, see how much of the room it can consume before someone puts an end to its hunger, but he isn’t an idiot. He has to leave if he wants to keep burning things. He’ll be caught otherwise. And apparently, it’s hard to indulge in arson tendencies when you’re awaiting bail.

Jon’s countdown hits zero, and he walks away. Keeps walking until he’s left the party entirely.

A car flashing red and blue wails past him at some point, a firetruck following it shortly after. He checks the time – maybe eight minutes since he left the party? The pile should have drawn a nice, charcoal black ring around itself by now, and shouldn’t have pulled too much else into the fire. Come Monday he’ll probably hear just how much Jennifer preferred only losing her most beloved items. There was so much else in the room, and it was a tragedy, truly, but it could have been worse.

She might have been lying, of course. He’ll hear that too.

“Oi,” someone says, and Jon turns his head to see a woman sitting on a bench. Lounging might be more accurate, though even that doesn’t fully convey how at ease she is on a wooden bench, in London, in the dead of night. She’s practically melted into the wooden slats; arm through over the side, barely on the seat, legs crossed.

Jon hurries on. His hand slips into his pocket, grabs a hold of the stolen matchbox for reassurance.

“I’m talking to you, runt,” she calls after him. Her tone is playful, the way a venus flytrap dancing in the breeze might appear playful to a fly. Jon doesn’t like to be a fly.

“What,” he snaps as he turns around, but any further retort dies before it can reach his tongue; further than that, nothing comes to mind. The cutting remarks he has instinctively been able to reach for, that have conjured as soon as he turned his mind to the idea of hurting, are beyond his grasp, even they exist at all. Jon can’t think of anything to say to hurt this stranger.

Through his glare, he can see her grin, and the drip drip drip spilling from her fingers in droplets, and is hit with the uneasy realisation that she can’t be hurt.

“You Jonathan Sims?”

“Yes.”

“Alright. You and I are going to have a friendly little chat, then.” There is nothing friendly in her voice.

“I don’t think we will, actually.”

“Well, I’m talking to someone tonight about a housefire that happened around here in, oh, was it 1995? Mm, thought so. I can talk to you, or I can talk to the police, but I will be talking.”

Jon can easily picture how his life will fall apart if he doesn’t talk to this woman. His grandmother would kick him out. His peers would unanimously shun him, leaving him unable to whisper dreadful things to them when his health is at its worst. The school could ask him to leave. He doesn’t know his way around the legal system, doesn’t know what would happen for a crime he committed at eight years old, but he can’t imagine it doing any good for his future.

Or he could talk.

“…I suppose I’m better company than the police. And you are?”

“Jude Perry, a member of the Lightless Flame. I’ve been sent to talk to you about offering protective services. Or, as protective as we can be, serving the Desolation.”

“The Desolation?” The word feels like a spark in his mouth, like if he spat gasoline while saying it, he could breathe fire. The Desolation. It shouldn’t, given its connotations, but it has a comfortable feeling to it, not unlike sinking into a too hot bathtub.

“A god, and the only god worth worshipping. The Desolation is pain and hurt and loss, potential laying in ruins, all the bright searing heat of fire without an ounce of its comfort. If you feed it, fearlessly and without hesitation, it will reward you with the most deliciously destructive powers you can possibly imagine; starve it, and it’ll eat you instead. Not that you have to worry about that, though, do you? You’ve been feeding it from a young age.”

“What do you – the house I burned down, Mister Spider’s house? Is that what you mean?”

“Bingo. You were, what, eight years old and committing arson? And destroying agents of the Web? You’re quite the prodigy.” Jude pats the bench, neatly picking up whatever had dropped from her fingers, and Jon, tentatively, sits down.

“That was almost a decade ago. Why is the Cult interested in me now?”

She shrugs. “Partly because you committing arson could’ve been a one-and-done thing, and partly because you were a child. You had the potential to follow the Desolation all on your own – ironic as it is, the others didn’t want that potential to go to waste. I guess it hasn’t.”

“You guess?” Jon scoffs. “What, I haven’t been setting enough forest fires? Committing enough arson?”

“Murdering enough people?” She smiles at his silence. “No, you haven’t. You’ve had your head in textbooks and been saying mean things, because you’re a teenager.

“You’ve got a weird way of worshipping the Desolation, but you seem to get the job done, since you’re not a smouldering corpse yet. In fact, the Desolation seems to quite like you. How many matches are in that box of yours?”

“Enough,” he retorts instantly. He’s been using the same stolen matchbox for years, ever since killing Mister Spider, and, when he pulls it from his pocket, it shows. Whatever picture was on the front has long since faded, and the edges are soft with almost a decade’s worth of wear. Muscle memory leads, and soon he has a match in his hand.

“Never runs out, does it?” Jude muses. She plucks the match from Jon’s hand and strikes it against her thumb. Impossibly, the head burns.

Jon stills for a moment. Logically, he knows that the match box ought to be empty by now, having been used for nine years and some change, regardless of how full it was when he first stole it. But he’s never had to check for matches, the process of sliding back the case, grabbing one, closing the box, and striking so mechanical that he could do it blind. He’s simply never looked.

He looks now. The box only has one match – until he pulls it out, then shuts the box, leaving it with none.

“Everything runs out.”

She takes the new match, lights it with the one burning against her fingers. “Not that. Check again.”

He opens the box, and a single match stares back at him.

“I know it seems counterproductive,” she says, circling her wrist, “But if you’re destroying, the Desolation provides. Very reciprocal. It’s given me the ability to burn, and made me into wax to be moulded to its needs. You serve it, you feed it, and you will always be taken care of.”

Slowly, Jon puts the matchbox away. He looks back to Jude. “And the Lightless Flame – they want to ‘take care of’ me?”

“They do. Whatever you need to keep serving the Desolation – someone to keep the police off you’re back, extra hands to pour the gasoline, a place to stay – we’ll make sure you have it.”

“And if I don’t want the Lightless Flame’s protection?”

“We tell the police everything you’ve done. Pulling strings might not be our specialty, but we can pull enough that they’ll believe every nasty little thing we tell them you did.”

“Right.” Jon blinks. “Do I – Do I need to do anything to accept?”

“Two things. Officially, you just help us with any projects we call you in for. Unofficially, you need to shake my hand.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Prodigy or no, you were rude when I tried to strike up this conversation. Ignoring me, prying for something to hurt me with – oh, yes, I felt that. I bet you didn’t know it came with a sensation, when you search for the words that will destroy a person, but it feels a little like sifting your fingers through my brain. All you actually hurt were my feelings, in the end, but it was rude. So, shake. My. Hand.”

Their short conversation has been crammed full of so much information that Jon hasn’t begun to process any of it, but the agitation in Jude’s voice trickles past the rest of the night’s revelations and registers. She’s sounded dangerous the whole time – though, venus flytrap doesn’t cover the half of her danger – but it was tempered by amusement. Now, it’s sharpened with her anger.

He holds out his hand.

Jude seizes it instantly, curling a finger around his wrist. Burning, blistering, brilliant heat explodes from every point of contact and Jon feels the pain in his throat from his scream but it is not terror or even pain fuelling the sound, it’s the scream that comes from a rollercoaster, it’s the scream that comes from the best news. It’s a scream of revelation.

This is what would happen if he dropped the match. This is how it feels. This is what the sparks entreat each time he lights a fire.

Jon can dimly hear Jude speaking beneath his cries.

“I think you’re a bit of an ass, and so much of a bookworm that the Eye would love to take you as its own. But you’re better off with the Lightless Flame than those Beholding freaks. Better off burning books than reading them. Don’t forget it.

“See you later, 451.” Four-five-one.

Jude walks away, leaving him alone on the bench.

Jon takes a few minutes to get his breathing under control before he even thinks to look at his hand. Where he expected to see burns is only the sooty black impression of a hand which, when he rubs it against his shirt, comes away easily. Or, most of it does. Three stubborn black marks remain on the inside of his wrist.

451.

Deliriously, all he can wonder is if she even read the book before branding him.

Notes:

(Branding summary: Jon shakes Jude's hand, and she brands him with 451 because she thinks he's a nerd and needs to be reminded to burn books, not read them. Jon strongly suspects she hasn't read Fahrenheit 451. He's probably right.)

Oh Jude and Jon, the more your first encounter changes the more it stays the same

Also, I'm on tumblr (click!) and very happy to talk about this AU and any of my other fics, just shoot me an ask :3!!

Chapter 3: Ignition

Notes:

CW: more canon- and desolation!Jon-typical Desolation junk, including self-immolation (to skip, stop reading at He cross to the bathroom and see the end notes for summary)

The Cult of the Lightless Flame is endlessly generous in their assistance. When Jon had said that he needed to go to Oxford University to keep feeding the Desolation as he had been, he had a letter of acceptance in his mailbox within the week, including a statement that the course fees for the first semester of his chemistry degree had been paid in full. Each semester went by in the same manner, with course fees, dorm fees, and weekly allowances all being paid without Jon having to say a thing.

As with their more criminal inclinations, the Lightless Flame is nothing but thorough. As promised, he is cared for and wants for very little. He is taught all there is to teach about the Desolation and the other 13 Entities, always through the fiery lens of the church’s perspective. When they call him in for a job, he tells them what he suspects the best way to destroy the target is; fire or explosives, more often than not, simply need to be set in the most effective locations, but a few choice words can be equally destructive.

Thorough. It would almost be admirable if it weren’t so immoral.

Jon struggles with his own morality, now that he knows his poor health and the actions that alleviate it can be lain at the feet of some fear god, rather than some basic, personal flaw. Anything he does to ease the ever-present hunger or headache, or to help the Lightless Flame, must be innately wrong, right? It feeds the Desolation. It brings ruin and destruction and fear. It cuts short potential, ends things before they can begin or come to fruition, salts and scorches the earth, so to speak.

But he needs it to survive. He’d sort of had an inkling of that before Jude Perry took him under her proverbial wing; he says something mean, something bad happens because of him, he burns a few things, and he feels better. But Jon understands, now, that feeding the Desolation is more than staving off a bad headache.

The Desolation is a burning candle that Jon waits at the bottom of. More victims, more harsh words, more effective, meaningless destructive places additional wax between himself and the Entity that burns through it. His actions buy him time, but the hungry flames will come for him eventually. And if molten flesh is a Desolate blessing, well, Jon doesn’t want to imagine what its wrath will look like.

He needs to feed the Desolation to survive.

But it’s wrong.

But he doesn’t want to die. Neither do his habits.

Oxford has bigger and better libraries than Jon could ever have dreamed of, and he makes good use of them through his degree, both for coursework and his own, more destructive reading habits. He reads greedily, practically devouring textbooks and recommended readings and anything he can get his hands on.

He still checks for bookplates. When he finds them, he destroys them.

By the time he’s in the third year of his degree, Jon understands that not all books are best destroyed with fire. Some books are, of course – burning normal textbooks the week before exams sends his classmates into a panic that wipes his headache away as easily as one wipes away sweat, sates his hunger like, well, a book sates a fire. Leitners involving the Web, the Flesh, and the Corruption are singed, cauterised, and sterilised by fire, ensuring they can never hurt anyone else.

(Not that he’s been able to comprehensively test this on all Entities as an adult. Jon hasn’t been able to find Web books to destroy in Oxford’s sprawling libraries, but he knows that they’re there, his attention slipping over them, hands refusing to pull them from the shelves. And he knows that fire will destroy them.)

Some other books, some other Entities, require more creative methods.

For example, Jon once found a Stranger-afflicted anatomy book that made you question whether those around you were human or something pretending to be human. He bound it to another book, identical save for the fact it was normal, and stiffly informed it that he knew it wasn’t a real book. The Leitner’s pages turned to plastic before his eyes, the act of being caught for what it is and what it is not stripping the words and danger from its pages.

Or the Buried accounting textbook he discovered that had endless, unrelenting practice questions to complete that would overwhelm you with the sheer volume of work. Again, he bound the book tight, though this time to no peer, but rather to a comical number of balloons. Jon pushed it out of a fourth-floor window and watched it float up, up, up into the sky, becoming insignificant in comparison to the Vastness of the sky. It turned to dirt, debris drifting down to Earth, before the balloons were even out of sight.

Jon hopes, in some uselessly screaming part of himself, that destroying these books makes him a little less selfish for feeding the Desolation with his other actions. It keeps him alive without hurting anyone - it saves so many lives! It has to. If those Leitners were anything like Mr Spider…

He stubbornly ignores how selfish his hope is in turn.

 

“So, the Desolation has an antagonistic relationship with the Web,” Jon summarises Jude’s most recent lecture as he packs his former roommate’s items into boxes. He isn’t sure how many roommate’s he’s had this semester, let alone over the course of his degree, or how many more the university will try to match him with before they give up. Some poor administrator is probably pulling their hair out, crying tears of frustration, questioning their career choices, because they can’t pair anyone with Jon for more than a few weeks before they request a transfer, or drop their degree, or vanish.

The thought warms him.

“Correct,” Jude replies, burning a hole into the bed that isn’t Jon’s. She’s throwing something up in the air and catching it, over and over, amusing herself. She almost looks like she could be an Oxford student, too, if the object didn’t sink into her waxlike flesh each time she caught it.

“The Web relies on too many intricacies, on relationships and coincidence and strings that burn oh so easily. They’re so much fun to set on fire. And after all, we’re what happens to all the best laid plans,” she growls, “But there’s nothing more annoying than finding out your random destruction wasn’t so random after all, that you were unwittingly part of some plan. Manipulative creeps.”

Like all the other information Jude has given him about the Entities, Jon files away the relationship between the Desolation and the Web for later use. He hasn’t had much need for the knowledge yet, outside of destroying a few Leitners and surviving Jude’s more violent pop quizzes, but it’s comforting to have, much the way having his stolen matchbox is comforting. He can’t know when he’ll need it – that’s more an Eye quality – but it’s better to have and not need, than need and not have.

The Entities are curious things. Fourteen distinct categories of fear that grant powers to those who feed them. Though, they hardly are distinct, are they? A serial killer could just as easily feed the Hunt as the Slaughter; the ocean is common among the Vast, Buried, and Lonely; an identity crisis appeases the Spiral as much as the Stranger.

If terrifying things can flow from and to multiple Entities, are they truly distinct? Are there really multiple fear gods, and not just one, many-faceted god? Can one gain the favour and gifts of multiple gods, if they are multiple, if one is willing to feed them?

That line of thought had been quickly shot down with that’s blasphemy, 451, and a reminder that the Lightless Flame can stop taking care of him at any time.

In the present, Jon hums, folding the box’s lid shut and leaving faint, gasoline handprints on each flap. If he’s lucky, his ex-roommate won’t collect their belongings and he’ll have an excuse to burn them. Maybe that’ll help his gnawing hunger.

“What did you do to get rid of this last roomie, hm?” Wax drips from Jude’s hand to her face as she speaks, filling in wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, making her look younger in an instant.

“Nothing. They were getting headaches from the gasoline, and migraines trying to find the source of the scent.” Jon reaches for a new box, starts filling it. “I think I destroyed their sanity.”

“Make you feel better?”

Jon sighs. “No, it didn’t.”

“Well, there’s a shocker. Despite the name, gaslighting didn’t perk you up the same way blackmailing the homophobes, or turning in the plagiarists, or systematically destroying the belongings of those assholes did.”

He wants to bite back that he knows his acts of service to the Desolation are unorthodox, too much so to be as efficient as Jude’s. That he understands that his god is poised to feed on him. That he doesn’t have time to orchestrate grand scales of destruction while he’s studying for his chemistry degree. That his moral compass isn’t so covered in soot to have him burning down buildings and killing people, not without a reason to light the match.

(He thinks of the door to Mister Spider’s house and wishes he’d stayed to watch it burn.)

Something stitches his jaw shut, keeping the words in his throat, and so he says none of that, instead muttering, “Yes, well, there’s always the next roommate.”

“Have they told you who the poor sod will be?”

“Yes.”

A few days later, the poor sod in question shows up.

Gerard Keay, at a glance, is one of the better matches the university has tried to pair him with for student housing over the past two years and change. His few differences, namely his piercings and makeup, aren’t negatives, but are outweighed by his similarities to Jon.

The both of them are tattooed, though Gerard’s many eyes far outnumber Jon’s 451 brand, fire on his finger, and the sleeve he’s collected since joining the Lightless Flame. They both dye their hair black – Jon to cover his grey streaks, Gerard his blonde hair, however badly. If Gerard’s clothes were less tattered and better acquainted with an iron, they would blend near seamlessly into Jon’s wardrobe. As it is Jon has half the mind to steal his leather trench coat when Gerard inevitably leaves.

Jon takes this in as he looks over Gerard, staring from the doorway, attention fixed on Jon rather than the charred remains of his assigned bed’s sheets. If he were frowning any harder, his eyebrow piercings would clink loudly.

“You’ve got a few Marks.” It’s said like a statement, but Gerard’s expression suggests that it was very close to being a question instead.

“Marks?”

“Encounters with Entities. Shitty souvenirs, really – ‘I survived an eldritch terror and all I got was this stupid Mark’. Survived the Web, anyway. Looks like you’re teasing the Eye, so maybe it’s ‘I courted an eldritch ter-’ ”

“I’m not a – a Beholding freak.”

“Oh, ouch, tell me how you really feel about my patron. But I guess that explains why it’s not your strongest Mark. You’re one of those Desolation hotheads, aren’t you?” Gerard says.

“I am not a hothead!” Jon snaps hotly.

“Right.” He looks almost pleased with himself.

The scent of gasoline wells up and Jon wipes his palms across his jeans. Jude has never said that he had to keep his affiliation with the Lightless Flame, or the Desolation for that matter, a secret, but has always organised to keep it hidden nonetheless. Payments for his courses don’t exactly come from Lightless Flame Member Funds, and Jude doesn’t contact him on his personal phone. It’s all very hush hush.

Gerard doesn’t have the same discretion with his alignment. Even if he hadn’t outright said that the Eye is his patron, the tattoos on every joint are neon sign spelling out his affiliation. And all the bullshit about Marks – that’s Knowing, it has to be, a weird little gift from Gerard’s chosen Entity.

Jon doesn’t know what will happen if someone finds out about his own alignment, particularly that someone is from another Entity, and from the Eye no less. He doesn’t know what will happen to himself, or to Gerard. Which of them the Lightless Flame will hurt more.

A brief image of setting his room on fire, burning this chapter of his life and inserting himself in some new story, flashes in his mind, and his fingers twitch toward his matchbox.

“You’re with the Eye, correct?” Jon grits out instead, fear and anger contending behind the words, both strong enough to ensure his tone is stern. Before he can even consider sifting through Gerard’s mind for the perfect weakness to exploit, Gerard nods.

“Bit awkward if I wasn’t, considering,” he says, and gestures to his many tattoos.

“You’re pissing me off,” Jon says, “The last Entity-aligned being that pissed me off died screaming as everything it loved burned around it. Unless you can See a different way to avoid that fate for yourself, I would advise shutting up.”

Gerard looks him over.

He must take in the clenched fists and jaw, the almost yellow sheen to his otherwise black hair, the rising scent of gasoline, the ink flames and figures climbing his arm.

He must see something else that Jon doesn’t account for.

“Have you ever killed a human?” Gerard asks.

Jon hesitates for a moment. “No.”

“Then I’ve met scarier books, and scarier roommates beside. So, which bed’s mine then?”

Gerard shoves his hands in his pockets, rocks back and forth on his heels, and looks the picture of casualness as he waits for Jon to reply. Silence stretches between them.

“The burnt one looks toasty.” Gerard muses.

Jon glares. “I’m sure it is.”

“Sure you don’t want it? Might feel homey.”

Despite himself, and his words, Jon smiles. “Fuck off.”

They warm up to each other over a few weeks, a pun that Gerard – Gerry – is quick to use and Jon is quicker to flip him off for. It helps that Gerry bites back with his own remarks, meets Jon’s comments with deadpan humour, tells him flat-out when he goes too far, but never, ever flees. It’s probably the first time someone has stuck around this long of their own volition.

For a semester, Jon had been partnered with one Georgie Barker for some course that he can’t even recall the name of. Probably one of his electives on parapsychology. The partner assignments had been very final, no changes allowed unless someone dropped the course.

Even though he never meant to, he had often found himself snapping about her podcasting dreams being just that, or her storytelling being juvenile (it had been quite brilliant, actually, but Jon was bitter and jealous), or some other offhand comments that he can’t remember. Georgie had been patient as a Saint through it all. She never contacted him for anything besides their course work, though, and never again after the final exam.

Jon thinks that was one of the courses he managed to get discontinued. He doesn’t think too hard about why he’d wanted it done, or the aching in his chest entirely unrelated to his hungry god’s demands.

Point being, Georgie hadn’t wanted to stay with him.

Gerry does. That makes him Jon’s first proper friend.

It helps, he thinks, that they both know about Entities, more so that they’re close enough to their chosen ones to have to feed. The headaches and hunger that come and go are understood. Jon had complained about the near-constant hunger, just once, and how his words as much as his pyromania made it lessen. I’m hungry all the time. Gerry had look at him, disgust clear in all his eyes, and said, And you think I’m not? Don’t be a prick. They didn’t talk about it much after that, but the mutual understanding of Entity-induced hunger still served as a bond.

Jon feels a flicker of something close to envy when Gerry reveals that he has a way of feeding without hurting anyone, something about his job at the Magnus Archives. The flicker dies when he mentions that his headaches are constant, never straying below a baseline of pain no matter how many Statements he reads.

Gerry explains his understanding of the Entities to Jon and, as with every other morsel of information, Jon takes it in with rapt interest. His explanation is much less Desolation-centric, less religious, less concerned with ending the world in a blaze of screaming agony. It’s strange, but Jon understands how bias may have impacted both Gerry and Jude’s lectures on Entities, so it is also informative.

It turns out Gerry isn’t even a student at Oxford, as he reveals one evening, smoke trailing from loosely held cigarettes and ash drifting from the window. He’s just staying in the dorms while he looks through the libraries for books to burn. Specifically, he’s been sent looking for a drama textbook that makes the reader blindly follow any expectations, commands, and wishes of the people around them. Nothing more than a puppet. A stand-in. Certainly not a human; that would require a degree of autonomy these victims simply aren’t afforded.

“And you’re sure it’s not one of the Stranger’s books?” Jon asks, the words grey. The theatre and diminished sense of self make it sound like the Stranger’s just as much as the loss of the control would place it at the Web’s feet.

Gerry huffs. “We’ve been over this, they aren’t inherently -”

“Distinct. Yes, I know, I know. Colours if colours hated us.” Jon waves his hand dismissively, then discards his cigarette when it starts to smoulder against his skin. Gerry stomps it out as Jon gets a new one. Lighting it is as familiar as his with matches, shaking one out of a packet that hasn’t emptied since Gerry started sharing it, holding one end in his mouth, the other just shy of his tattooed fingers until it catches.

“Knew that brain of yours wasn’t just for show,” Gerry says with a wry smile, “Gertrude says it’s Web more than anything, and the old bat’s usually right. I just won’t know ‘til I see it.”

“I suppose that’s for the best. Web books burn easily.” They did over a decade ago, at least.

“Books burn easily. We should know.” He looks to Jon’s branded wrist rather pointedly and, weaving in and out of meagre firelight and flickering shadows, the eyes on his joints almost seem to turn as well.

Gerry had stopped worrying about the glaring 451 once he saw how many books Jon read, how feverishly he would consume knew knowledge. The fact that only very particular books had to worry about Jon’s fiery habits had certainly helped.

(He worried a different way when Jon had explained, in a bored tone, how the brand came to be. He really is Jon’s first friend.)

“Not all books - I should know.” Jon scoffs. “Do let me know when you’re planning to burn a Desolation Leitner so I can start practicing my laugh.”

“I’m not an idiot,” Gerry says, with a roll of his eyes (and his eyes and his eyes and his eyes -) and a shove. “If you know so much about destroying books, why don’t you come with me for this one, huh?”

“What, you need me to get around the Beholding’s censors? It doesn’t tell you how to destroy knowledge?”

“No, you wanker, I want to hang out.”

Jon freezes, a frown coming onto his face. He’s being invited somewhere he isn’t strictly needed?

“You know, like friends do?” Gerry prompts.

“Knowing is more your specialty than mine,” he scoffs. It’s a poor attempt at nonchalance, deflection, but neither of them acknowledges that.

“Christ, it’s no wonder the Eye isn’t your patron. You’re denser than an encyclopedia. Just say you’ll come with me.”

“Yes, yes, alright. I’ll go with you.”

For all the shooing hand motions and scowl on his face, Jon finds himself looking forward to it.

 

There is something strange about picking a locked door and walking through the libraries after hours. Jon supposes it should be exhilarating, or nerve-wracking, either emotion driving forth the suspense of waiting to be caught. Each long shadow could be security, or a staff member, or a student locked inside. There’s something electric to the idea of their own expedition being cut short, but it teeters on the edge of self-destruction, so he doesn’t dwell on it.

Instead, Jon almost wishes they’d done this in broad daylight. That’s how most of his book-destroying trips had gone for the past two-and-a-bit years. Scandalise a few people, scare them with glimpses of something they can’t begin to understand, break down the thin wall holding Entities away from their idea of reality – things that feed the Desolation.

Or maybe he shouldn’t wish for that? It isn’t the crux of the matter.

Jon follows Gerry as they stalk through rows upon rows of shelves. They take stairs and turns where they have to in order to follow whatever trail it is Gerry can See to the Leitner. They chat idly, mostly about Jon’s courses and Gerry’s workplace, neither silence nor conversation feeling awkward.

The urge to start pulling books from their neat places on the shelves and start frantically searching for bookplates weighs his feet down, directs his attention away from his friend. Yes, they’re here for one book in particular, but they could find more, couldn’t they? Books that require more than just burning. Those would be more fun, wouldn’t they? More destructive? More Desolate?

The closer Gerry says they are to the book, the more it feels like Jon’s walking through molasses. But whenever Jon starts to trail behind, Gerry waits, as close to patiently as he can, for him to catch back up. The hour makes it hard for Jon to read his face.

They make it to a display of textbooks, showing off the required readings for different courses and the associated, exorbitant prices. Jon hadn’t realised how much it costs to study. He’d make a note to thank Jude and the Lightless Flame if he thought they’d appreciate the sentiment.

Gerry’s rings shine in the struggling moonlight as he takes the drama textbook from its place. Guiding Principles of Characterisation. Gasoline perfumes the air as Gerry opens the cover just enough to identify the damning bookplate.

“This is the one,” he says as he holds it up, looking back to Jon. A slice of moonlight combined with stark shadows emphasises the worry that crosses his face like lightning. “Fucking hell, Jon, you’re more Web than this book is.”

His throat is dry. It clicks when he swallows, a gun out of bullets. “P-pardon?”

“Don’t panic.” Gerry holds up his hands, the Leitner following the action. “It’s just, maybe I was wrong. Maybe you’re more than just marked by the Web. It’s so stuck to your joints I’m surprised you can even move, let alone of your own free will.”

“Shut up!” Jon snaps.

He can’t think about being marked by the Web, or – or controlled, if that’s what Gerry is implying. He’s got too much on his plate already. His studies – chemistry is not an easy degree, and the course load is backbreaking – and his obligations to the Lightless Flame and constantly feeding the Desolation. He can’t think about being used by the Web.

He can’t think.

He can’t…

Any train of thought about the Web is quickly lost in white noise. And hasn’t it always been that way? His attention sliding over anything the Mother of Puppets might have lain claim to? Web-aligned Leitners managing to avoid his wrath. People already being tormented by addiction, or loss of control, or manipulation, or spiders, never being tormented by Jon as well. Street signs to Mister Spider’s house being painful to look at.

Jon drags a shaking hand through his hair and it comes away slick.

He pulls his matchbox from his pocket, shakes out a match. Can’t strike it. Can’t raise his hands, bring them together, move in a practiced motion. He holds them out to Gerry – who wisely only takes the match and the necessary action to light it.

“You alright, mate?”

“Just bur -” Jon can’t even say how to destroy it. He spits the words he can say over his shoulder as he walks away. “Just get on with it.”

Leaving the library is easier than walking through it.

Ten minutes later, Gerry finds him at a bench-table outside the library, unlit cigarette in his hand. Jon stares at it like it might tell him what side it falls on, Desolation or Web. Does it want to kill or control him? Does it matter?

“Mind if I bum one?” Gerry asks, sitting on the bench, feet resting on the seat.

Jon obliges. “Smoking kills, you know.”

“I know.” A huff of laughter follows. He hunches over in a question that Jon answers by lighting the cigarette. “It’ll have to try harder than this to kill me. I don’t know if it’s deadlier than my work, or the Avatars I meet, or the little errands Gertrude sends me on.”

He doesn’t mean to look for the information, but it situates itself on his tongue and breezes past his lips anyway. Takes the place a cigarette and its smoke would have. Maybe that decides that, then.

“Or the tumour in your brain.”

Gerry stares at him, disbelief painted in orange and grey and gleaming silver.

“Sorry, what?”

“Your brain tumour. It’s probably the best competition for the cigarettes, actually.” Jon wills himself to shut up, but tension melts from his shoulders with each word, and he’s never been that strong-willed anyway. “Since it’s a slow killer, too. A few more years before it kills you, but who knows how much of that you’ll still be useful to Gertrude. She’ll get sick of you just like Mary did.”

“Don’t be a prick.”

“I’m just being honest,” he lies. Unlike when he was in high school, Jon knows it’s not just honesty that makes him to speak. It’s the fear that settles on Gerry’s face like a death-mask; the way his shoulders hunch as he wonders, is it true? “Didn’t you say that Gertrude doesn’t really keep assistants anymore? She’s probably looking for an excuse to get rid of you already. I can’t say firing you because you have cancer is legal, but I rather think legality isn’t a concern of hers. It probably suits her just fine.”

Gerry shakes his head, presses his palm to his eye. “She can’t fire me.” And it is so easy for Jon to identify the alternative because it scares Gerry so much.

“I suppose she’ll kill you, then.”

Jon feels light as a feather, his aches and pains a distant memory, as soon as the words are spoken. There’s nothing else to say on the matter. Gerard Keay and his brain tumour have been wrung dry, the fear of his usefulness coming to an end dripping into a wineglass for collection, being sipped by Jon before he passes it over to the Desolation to enjoy. He hadn’t known how much he’d needed it.

He watches as Gerry schools his features. Disgust. Jon can recognise it even in the poor lighting. He’s seen it enough times – not as many as he’s seen smirks, or laughter, or even sadness, but enough.

“Listen,” Gerry says, voice low and husky from the smoke, “I don’t know how much of that was you, or the Desolation, or the Eye, or even the Web. But if you need to feel better, go burn something besides the only bridge you’ve managed to build in your miserable fucking life.”

Guilt pulls Jon back down to earth, heavy and foreign.

“Gerry-”

“Go.” Gerry puts out the cigarette on the table and leaves.

He doesn’t think to move until Gerry isn’t even a dark smudge on the darker horizon. He wets his lips, murmurs, “Right, then.”

Jon’s thoughts are all that keep him company on the walk back to their dorm. His dorm alone, again, maybe.

The tumour that he found (stumbled upon feels more apt) isn’t big. It’s location in the brain will make things difficult, he’s almost certain of it, but surely it’s for the best that Jon was able to find it so soon? Isn’t an early diagnoses a blessing? Won’t Gerry see it that way? He doesn’t realise the idea is hopeful, desperately so, until he finds it fluttering around his thoughts.

Christ, he hopes he hasn’t wrecked his only friendship. He really does need to burn something else.

The door clicks shut behind him. A drawer slides open, a non-descript phone rattling with the motion. Jon picks it up and flips it open, fingers hovering over the keys.

He could message Jude and ask her if what he’s about to do is a good idea, or advisable, or wise, or some descriptor more appropriate as none of them really apply.

The drawer slides shut and the phone rattles with it. It’s not like she’d reply at this hour anyway.

He crosses to the bathroom and starts methodically removing and folding his clothes, setting aside his matchbox when he finds it. It’s hard not to picture cobwebs hiding in each fold or stretching between his skin and the material. Or, worse yet, wrapped around his every joint, marking him as clearly as Gerry’s eye tattoos mark him, though worse for the lack of choice in the matter.

He can’t think on the Web long enough to get truly angry or distraught over how much the Entity has steered his life. A silk blindfold stops him from looking closely at any thoughts that manage to weep through the gauze staunching the flow. But it doesn’t take much for Jon feel secure in his decision.

Jon is being controlled by the Web.

The Web hates the Desolation.

The Desolation takes care of him.

When Jon opens the matchbox, it’s brimming with fresh matches. They chatter together as he walks over to the bathtub, sits down in it, empties the box over himself. He plucks one of them from the crease of his hip and strikes it against the box, which he places on the tiles and preys the Desolation won’t claim. He watches the match sizzle between his fingers. He smells gasoline.

He can’t bring himself to drop the match, the muscles not responding to chemical impulses, but he doesn’t have to. Tongues of fire lap kitten licks down the match until it reaches Jon’s skin, then it surges along the film of sweat, greedily eating up the fuel and the skin beneath. Additional smaller firers spark to life as the wave of fire rolls alone his body to meet the matches. When he can feel fat bursting, blood boiling, flesh cooking, bones popping, he laughs with the sheer joy of being able to move entirely of his own free will.

He dies long before the fire does. Unlike the fire, he comes back, and he laughs at that as well.

Notes:

(Self-immolation summary: Jon uses many, many matchsticks and his gasoline sweat to set himself on fire and rid himself of the Web's control. He dies and comes back - much like Jude Perry did)

I wanted to write more of Jon and Gerry goofing around and doing friendship stuff like dying each other's hair and burning books, but I was also very aware of the fact that my last update was over a month ago, so I didn't : ( maybe as a deleted scenes fic if people want it!

I'm sorry for not replying to comments on the last chapter (I was very unwell for a few weeks) but please know that I grin like an idiot when I read them <33 I'm so happy that y'alls are enjoying desolation!Jon!!!

Chapter 4: Inferno

Notes:

CW: Desolation- and Beholding-typical junk, gun violence (brief), eye injury (implied), minor character death (implied, but who's to say really).

There is not a single shadow, not a single dark corner, in the Church. Sunlight cuts through large windows, flooding the room with natural lighting. Torches, affixed to the walls in old steel holders, spit fire light and heat and black anywhere the sun’s touch is found wanting. Electrical lights glare white from beneath the pews and above the rafters. All the light in all its shapes comes off as stark and uncomfortable.

It's swelteringly hot inside, more characteristic of a greenhouse than a church, and entirely foreign for any common English building. It probably stopped being a common building once the Desolation’s followers claimed it for their own, and won’t be normal again even if they burn it down. Fear, much like smoke, has an awful tendency to linger.

Jon should be used to the heat by now, given his years in the Cult, but the torches are not enough fire to distract him from the discomfort, and he shifts in his seat. He can hear one of the more senior members of the Cult delivering a sermon at the front of the room, but he isn’t paying it much attention. He’s quite sure he’s not the only one; the others in the audience may be staring at the speaker, but their eyes are glassy, hands fidgeting. He watches as one member seems to play a game with his own molten flesh, wax flowing from elbow to wrist and back, grossly misshaping the forearm.

Jude sits on a chair on the stage, elbows resting on her knees, feet kicking an agitated rhythm into the floorboards.

He wonders what these sermons looked like before Agnes died. He’d never attended one while she was alive, despite meeting her once, which was probably owed to how new Jon had been. Maybe sermons had been more lively with the Messiah, however reluctant she was, present, but it was hard to imagine any monologue about the fiery end of the world truly being lively. There are only so many ways you can rephrase the world will end in agony and be remade in the Desolation’s awful vision.

“We are the few who will see the beauty in what is to come!” The preacher speaks in a fervour, the lectern smouldering beneath his white-knuckled grip. Jon can’t decide if the force stems from devotion or frustration at the rest of the Cult’s inattention, or maybe just the habit of breaking things. He understands the latter the best.

“Lakes and rivers and seas will boil where they do not evaporate! The sky will burn with the blue of the hottest flame! Every plant, every structure, every creature, will be more fragile than ash when the Desolation turns the full force of its wrath upon them!”

Jon’s phone rings.

Several people around him blink themselves out of their stupor and turn toward him, eyes sparking with something dark. The temperate ticks up a few more degrees as the few who had been paying attention to the sermon – mostly those sitting on the stage, but a few in the pews – let their annoyance be known; wax skin bubbling, fire spitting from empty eye sockets, blood literally boiling. Fire, real fire, climbs up the embroidered likeness on the preacher’s robes as he glares at Jon.

The weight of attention hardly ever burns but, as the attention is of a full Cult of the Lightless Flame’s sermon, it burns now.

The urge to answer the call and really piss off the preacher and the Cult’s higher-ranking members is strong. He could ruin this little Church service. Make the Desolation feed on itself, rather than him and his for a change.

Jude catches Jon’s eye and drags her thumb, slow as anything, along her neck in warning, splitting the skin. Cut it out. He knows she thinks it’s bad enough that Jon mellowed out, rather than becoming more temperamental, since becoming an Avatar. Since fighting with Gerry – not that she has that context. Jude just knows Jon is a poor excuse for a Desolation Avatar, and petty enough to take this call if he thinks it’ll piss off enough people without killing him.

Jon declines the call.

Everyone turns back to the preacher, satisfied, and most slip back into their violent daydreams. Jon waits a few more minutes before his curiosity gets the best of him and he slips out of the row, down the hall, and out the door. No one seems to mind.

The temperate drops to something more natural the second the door closes. From here, you would hardly know that the service within had true, dangerous, supernatural foundations. Jon can still hear the sermon through the wall (“We are the instruments of our God’s ambitions! It is our task to bring about a new vessel for the Spark of the Lightless Flame, a new Messiah to blaze the path for the Desolation’s immergence! ”), of course, but it is decidedly quieter, almost muted. Almost normal. More important to him is that he is the only one on this side of the door, so there is no one to glare at him for using his phone.

He doesn’t recognise the number that had called him, but that doesn’t stop him from calling it back. Call it the Eye’s influence. The call rings once, twice, three and a half times before the person on the other end picks up. Jon had expected there to be a bite to the voice, as most in the Cult who call him have, something angry or bitter cutting the words into sharp shapes, but he hears a tired smile instead.

“Are you playing hard to get? Because I think you’re supposed to wait for me to call again if you are.”

“Gerry?”

“You sound surprised.”

Jon splutters. “It’s been a few years since we saw each other, I would think I deserve to be a little surprised. I – I’ve even changed phones. How did you..?”

“Are you really going to ask how I Knew your number?”

He can hear the capitalisation through the static, recognises it, and huffs a laugh. “No, I suppose not.”

Conversation recedes for a beat, Jon holding the quiet phone to his ear and taking in the sound of the other man’s breathing. Beneath it, he can faintly hear machinery beeping, the gentle hum of someone else’s conversation, the whir of wheels rolling over linoleum. It’s more peaceful, objectively, than the preaching Jon can hear on the other side of the door.

“How are you?” He asks. It’s Gerry’s turn to laugh.

“Pretty shit, but good, all things considered. Better than I thought I’d feel after brain surgery. Wasn’t hopeful that I’d feel much of anything, really, but maybe I deserve to be a little surprised too.”

“After – oh! I was right?”

“You were right. You were also a prick.” There’s that little bit of bitterness Jon had expected, and he can’t say it’s unearned.

“…I was. I’m sorry, Gerry.”

“Yeah, well,” Gerry says, and Jon imagines he’s shrugging, apology quickly accepted, “You were still right. When I first went to get it checked out, the doctors were shocked to catch the tumour so early – they said it’s a miracle I even noticed anything wrong. But they got it out anyway. Well, eventually.”

“Eventually?”

“I only had it out yesterday. It’s been… delayed a few times, between rounds of chemo and work, but yeah. Eventually.”

“Christ.” Jon wipes a hand over his face. Gerry must have been petrified waiting for that surgery, the date constantly moving further and further back. He feels a slight loss at the waiting being over and quickly, violently, stomps it down. “I’m glad it went well, truly. It, ah, did go well, I hope?”

“Yeah. The surgeon sounded proper chuffed with herself for getting it all.”

“Good, good.”

Quiet again, and this time Jon can make out the sounds for what they are: the ambiance of a hospital. Ridiculously, he hopes Gerry has somehow found a black hospital gown, some small token to make him feel more comfortable. Good Lord, Gerry probably has all his piercings out and his rings and makeup off – he must look practically naked.

Gerry breaks the silence this time; maybe the pauses have been for him to catch his breath.

“I actually called to ask a favour.”

Jon’s nodding before he remembers that Gerry (probably) can’t see him. “Anything.”

“Someone’s feeling agreeable,” Gerry says, and again Jon’s imagination provides him with the accompanying action, this time an eyeroll and a smile, “Could you fill in for me at work? Gertrude said she needs someone with my penchant for setting shit on fire, and she thinks you’ll be an okay stand in.”

“Just okay? I think you were nicer with the tumour.”

“Too soon!” Gerry laughs – Jon notes not to joke about it again anyway. “I think you were nicer when you felt guilty.”

“I think being an Avatar makes me nicer, actually,” he says, absently scuffing the floor with his boot. “I burned away the Web’s influence.”

Quiet again.

He really hopes Gerry’s just catching his breath.

He stares at the fresh marks on the ground. “Gertrude needs me at the Magnus Institute, correct? When is she expecting me?”

An exhale rattles along the call. “The sooner the better, I guess. She didn’t say when she needed you by, but you won’t exactly be taking her by surprise if you rock up tomorrow. At any rate, if you stay until I get back and don’t traumatise anyone, we’ll be even.”

Even for you using my fear to feed yourself, Gerry doesn’t add, but Jon hears it in the light tone regardless.

“And we’ll be friends again?”

He’d blink, shocked, at how small his voice sounded, if he wasn’t so preoccupied with hope that Gerry would say yes. As it is Jon wishes that the Eye’s mark on him was a little bigger, a little stronger, so he could stop imagining Gerry’s expressions and see them for himself. It would be less cruel for him to be certain rather than presuming.

“We never stopped being friends, Jon.”

“Right.” Jon blinks, dazed, and despite himself, hopes Gerry is smiling the same way he is. “I’ll see you later, then, Gerry.”

“Later, Jon.”

 

The next day has Jon breezing up the steps to the Institute and walking through the doors as though his Entity owns the place. Goosebumps flock to and settle on his shoulders the second he crosses the threshold, but he pushes away the sensation, doesn’t let it bother him too much. The perks of being Marked, he supposes. Instead of fretting over being Beheld he shifts his tattoos around his body, focuses on the gentle push and pull of molten skin.

His attention flits over the sparse signage, completely bypassing the curious women at the front desk, and he lets it guide him further into the institute. Portraits stare at him and plaques gleam as he passes, the perfectly carved letters sagging slightly if he glares at them, melting under his distaste.

For the most part people steer clear of him should they pass. Really, it feels a little touch like being in school again.

After a few moments looking around the Archives proper, he doesn’t have to raise his hand to knock on the closed door when he finds it. Gertrude Robinson, Head Archivist. The embossed plate doesn’t even blink at his efforts to warp it. Behind the door, a tired, dismissive, long-suffering voice sighs, “Yes, come in,” and the door opens inward without a whisper.

An older women sits behind the desk, her severe features made more so by the bun pulling her hair back. She’d be swimming in her open cardigan if it weren’t pushed back to her elbows. From behind her glasses (which are purely decorative, given her patron, Jon’s sure of it,) Gertrude regards him with a critical eye.

He looks strikingly like her current assistant, which is to say, like a far cry from someone who ought to work in an archive if one were to assign a look to the role. A stereotype Gertrude very carefully fits herself into. The dye, the leather, the piercings – which are new and limited to his ears – and jewellery generally, the tattoos.

He’s moved his 451 brand to his throat specially for this job. It receives a withering stare.

“Hmm.” Gertrude purses her lips. “Jonathan Sims.”

“Gertrude Robinson.” He doesn’t move to sit, and she doesn’t invite him to. She certainly doesn’t look like much more than an old woman. It’s hard to reconcile Jude’s hatred of her, or Gerry’s stories about her, with the greying, cardigan-wrapped, bespeckled figure before him.

But Gertrude tied her life to Agnes’ own. Gertrude stopped the Scorched Earth, and who knows how many other rituals beside. She cuts a bloody path to where she needs to go, to do what she has to do and what no one else will. There must be danger hiding beneath that facade, and it makes itself evident once she starts speaking.

“I have read a handful of Statements about you. Unfortunately, you are just as they and Gerard told me you would be, save for some – finer details.” She speaks slowly, like she is almost unwilling to form the words for the bitter taste they bring to her tongue. “Your connection to the Desolation is stronger than I had been led to believe.”

“Gerry made it sound like my connection was my most employable quality. He also made it sound like you thought I’d be fine for whatever this job is.”

“Gerard does not have the first clue as to what I need you for. Frankly, he has been quite useless since this tumour business began occupying his mind, and more so the longer I insisted he wait to have it removed. With all the treatments he underwent, it was merely persistent, not terminal.” She shakes her head, tuts.

Jon’s fists clench and one of the papers closest to him sparks to life with fire, crackling greedily along the edges of the old material, claiming knowledge and dust alike in its glowing heat. The weight of something crushing and awful and all-knowing – the attention of something that never blinks – quickly smothers the fire. “Ah, there’s no reason to be emotional, now, Mr Sims.”

“I fucking disagree.” No wonder Gerry had been so scared of his tumour and how Gertrude would react. Acidic discomfort curls in his stomach at the thought of having preyed on that fear, that so very real fear.

“Never mind that. I suppose you would be… adequate, for what I have in mind, though your volatile patron does leave much to be desired. I understand you have a penchant for controlled destruction?”

“At times.” Jon crosses his arms over his chest. “Whatever gets the job done most efficiently. I’m good at figuring out what that is.”

“Yes, I imagine you are. And you have no qualms about harming the Entities and their followers or artifacts?”

“I prefer it,” he admits, the words slipping past his lips as though they were silk. His muscles tense, freeze with the realisation that he is not in control.

But the words go on. “It makes me feel like less of an ass about having to feed myself and the Desolation to survive. I’ve been trying to be better about it, since Gerry pointed it out, though my efforts did not begin in earnest until after he left Oxford. After I became an Avatar.

“I would like to think it wasn’t my fault that I ruined so many lives, that it was the Desolation or the Web driving the cruel words and crueler consequences, but that’s a cowards way out. I might have to use my powers to survive, but that does not mean they control me. If I can direct destruction toward the Entities, then maybe I can right some of my wrongs. At the very least I hope not to make them any worse.”

Quiet rushes in to fill the space his words had occupied. It would be silence if it weren’t for the gentle hum of something, something sitting on Gertrude’s desk. A recorder, one of those old-style ones. He wants to break it.

“Was that you?” The question is his own, at least, pressed from between gritted teeth.

She nods, demure. “It was. It would seem the Eye’s mark does not protect you from the powers it has given to me.”

“If you do that again, I will burn this fucking Archive down and use your oldest Statements as kindling, efficiency be damned. We’ll see how much the Eye likes you without your hoard of knowledge.”

“Yes,” Gertrude says, and for the first time, she smiles, “I imagine you will. I look forward to working with you, Mr Sims.”

She sends him off with instructions on how to get his ID and contractor (not employee, Gertrude was very specific that he wasn’t to sign any employment forms) paperwork filled out, and Jon glares through each step. The curious receptionist – he fights the impulse to sneer and call her Nosey Rosie – asks for his name, takes his photo, and checks over and over that Ms Robinson really wants you working with her? before handing over the contractor paperwork.

“Mr Bouchard would normally deal with this himself,” Rosie explains matter-of-factly, as though she is privy to some secret, “But he’s feeling a bit under the weather at the moment, the poor thing.”

Jon can’t fathom anyone regarding Elias Bouchard as a poor thing. Gerry hadn’t mentioned him often, but the few words he spared for the man were choice and full of dislike, more appropriate for a con artist than the head of an institute for paranormal research. The Lightless Flame didn’t like him simply for his association with Gertrude and the Eye. It isn’t often that Gerry and the Lightless Flame have a common dislike.

He's struck by the sudden desire to meet Elias. Self-improvement be damned, Jon wants to know what would destroy someone his friend and his Entity hate.

Instead, he hums. “Yes, quite.”

Rosie gives him a look – expectant, maybe, like she’s waiting for Jon to return to some social script and wish Elias back to good health – and waits. Jon looks back at her. She fidgets with a pen and her smile dims. A clock happily ticks away the seconds.

“Well!” Rosie gathers up the completed forms. “I’ll make sure Mr Bouchard sees these when he’s in again. We’ll call you when your ID is ready, but you can’t work until then, so feel free to leave.”

He considers staying still and watching Rosie squirm. He could make her ask him to leave outright, to go against her carefully cultivated politeness and social norms, chip away at what she feels is her mastery of people skills. It’s not the worst thing he could do. He almost deserves to do it, a reward for not calling her Nosey Rosie.

Burn something else rings in his mind.

“Thank you, Rosie,” Jon says instead, and he walks away.

He doesn’t choose to go outside. Outside would mean heading to the small apartment he rented on incredibly short notice, and there’s nothing really there for him. Nothing that would scratch the itch that burning would. Instead, Jon follows the signage and the pull in his chest toward the Institute’s library.

There will always be a library in his life. The Library of Jurgen Leitner will follow him wherever he goes, yes, but Jon has always gravitated toward having a library nearby. As a child, a teenager, university student, or, now that he is at the Magnus Institute, an adult, rows upon rows of books are a cornerstone of his life.

Even walking the stacks of this unfamiliar library, he recognises most of the names on the spines. The majority he has read, either for his studies or to pass the time; others he has checked before destroying their supernatural counterpart. Jon expects more of the latter category, given the Institute’s nature, but none of those books were inherently strange. It is only the Entities that made them that way, and Leitner’s bookplate which marked them as such.

What he finds instead are books on mythology, folk law, urban myths, paranormal creatures and sightings and anything adjacent to the mystical – without including a single mention of Smirke’s Fourteen. Jon rolls his eyes when he notices this. For all the Institute parades around as a place of the Eye, it certainly keeps its supporters blind.

His black boots lend to a steady, heavy pace as he follows the pull that lures him toward something in need of destruction. If the library is big enough there will always be at least one Leitner. It will hide between other books, moving to avoid detection by diligent librarians, picking out a suitable target: a researcher too tired to notice bleeding pages, a student too frantic to notice fog seeping from the dustcover. A child too young to notice the sticky residue of a spider’s web.

But Leitner’s aren’t quick enough to avoid Jon, not when he’s after something to burn. Maybe Gerry will point out that he’s got a bit of the Hunt in him next time they meet.

Jon’s trailing fingers come to rest on a spine without a title. It’s plain black, discrete in size and colour, it’s cover devoid of any writing, and cold to the touch. Not cold in the same way the Lonely can be, emotional distance numbing anything to come in contact with an artifact, but a lifeless cold. The cold of something that was, once, filled with the warmth and life of a beating heart, but never will be again. This is a book of the End.

It will make wonderful compost.

He slips the book from the shelf and strides toward the library’s exit. The librarian looks up from his computer as Jon passes, and then stands up as Jon continues to pass by with blatant disregard for any need to check out the book.

“Excuse me? Er, sorry, but excuse me?” The librarian says as Jon is passing through the scanners without an alarm going off.

Jon sighs, and stops. “Yes?”

“It’s just,” he wrings his hands, “You have to check out any library books you take? It’ll just take a second, I promise.”

Would Gertrude really care if he pissed off this librarian? Would it make it harder for him to work at the Institute? No, but it would if Gerry found out, he realises, and he doesn’t like his chances of hiding something from someone covered in so many Eye tattoos. His jaw clenches.

Even if he’s trying to be a better person, it’s not like he can’t be a little snarky. “It won’t be in your system,” Jon says, placing the book on the counter and quickly reading the librarian’s nametag. Martin. Martin doesn’t seem too surprised by his claim.

“Well, let’s have a little look-see and find out for sure,” Martin smiles as he takes the book. He looks over the cover for a barcode (“Hmm, nope, nothing there,”) then checks the inside covers for anything to scan (“Ooooor there! Hm.”), coming up empty.

“It might be one of those books,” Martin muses, pecking away at the keyboard and clicking the mouse a few times.

“Those books?” Jon raises an eyebrow.

“We get little visitors from Artifact Storage sometimes,” he explains, “So I’ve got to check if this is one of ours, or one of theirs. Their books show up almost by magic, I swear, but it’s probably just employees playing pranks. And people think libraries are boring!”

That startles a smile to Jon’s face. “I’ve never once thought libraries are boring.”

“You must have very good taste, then.” Martin smiles back at him, freckles almost lost in the rush of blood quickly crowding beneath his skin. That’s almost a shame; they seem like perfectly good freckles. They settle nicely on his soft face and, framed by ginger curls, make it obvious that he’s really quite handsome. But then, there is a certain charm to seeing someone blush.

Good lord, he’s hardly even had a conversation with this man. And he has a book to destroy!

“Yes, well,” Jon clears his throat (and his mind), “Who does this book belong to, then?”

“No one, from the looks of things.” He shrugs. “It’s not in the system as a library book or an artefact. Honestly, it might as well belong to you.”

The two men look at each other. Unlike earlier with Rosie, the lull in conversation feels like a conspiracy waiting to be shared, or a grin threatening to crack.

“You know, I don’t think anyone would know if you walked out with that book,” Martin says, voice conversational, eyes sparkling playfully even as he tries to keep a straight face.

“No? But you would.”

“Me? What do I know! I’ve never seen you before, let alone that book. What book?”

“Next you’ll say that you don’t even know what a book is.”

“Well, now that you mention it…” He taps a finger against his chin, the picture of someone deep in thought. Jon breaks before Martin does and the ease of it is surprising, but comforting, like waking up to find someone has tucked a blanket around your body. Easier than it had been with Gerry, even.

Jon takes the book back, holding onto it with a little more care. “A librarian who doesn’t know what a book is?” They’ll fire you soon enough fights to be said, thrashes behind his teeth, competes with you must be so underqualified that they hired you out of pity. What ultimately wins is, “That is one hell of a trick you’re pulling, Martin,” said with admiration.

Martin goes impossibly redder. “You, erm, you know my name?”

“One of us has to know things.” He starts walking away again – this time, Martin, spluttering, doesn’t try to stop him. “And of course I know; you’re wearing a nametag.”

When Jon gets to his apartment he finds a planter box, just bigger than the Leitner, brimming with fertile soil sitting by the door, and a sachet of unlabelled seeds beside it. He hums a thank you to the Desolation and quickly brings the planter inside, places it by the window, plants the book and seeds, and carefully pours water on top. The plants grow impossibly fast, the Desolation’s influence allowing them to draw from the End book’s wasted potential as it creates life rather than a fear of death.

Hell, the Desolation being used to create plants and soil should harm it in some way, but he can practically feel the Entity’s sigh of contentment as the book is consumed. He recalls Jude calling their Entity and its gifts appearing counterproductive. If it keeps him alive without requiring him to hurt someone, though, Jon isn’t willing to question it too much.

 

Rosie calls him early the next morning to let him know that his Institute ID is ready for collection, and that he can start work that same day, if he really wants to. Jon does just that.

He falls into a rhythm easily over the first week, the structured day and tasks to complete feeling similar to university. Once he’s figured out that statements and Statements are two very different things, and that Gertrude does not, in fact, want him to burn the statements to clear up space, he starts writing reports on Statements. He skims over the ones involving himself (Jennifer Tailor is one of a handful to speak to the Institute about him), takes the boring ones to research, asks artefact storage about items that pop up. It’s not like Gertrude had said he couldn’t outsource his work.

Only one person in research talks to him. The others shrink away from the faint gasoline smell and disinterested stare, their eyes fixed on blank screens. Timothy Stoker seems to have taken it as a personal mission to befriend anyone who enters his vicinity, and his research skills seem perfectly satisfactory, and with the lack of other volunteers no one stops him from being Jon’s personal researcher – least of all Jon. Once he gets past the urge to bring up Tim’s dead brother, Jon finds that he’s actually rather pleasant to spend time with, and a diligent researcher besides.

Likewise, most people in artefact storage are too cautious to hang around with the strange, new Archival Assistant, no matter how many times he grits out that he isn’t one. They probably wouldn’t be trusted around the artefacts if they didn’t possess a certain degree of natural avoidance. Sasha James’ curiosity overrides her caution, though, and she happily helps him find the relevant artefacts – if the Institute has them – in exchange for information about the Statements. She points out connections between the Statements before he notices them and builds on the ones he identifies.

He wonders if Sasha, Tim, or Martin know Gerry.

No one mentions him, least of all Gertrude, but Jon misses him. It’s funny; Jon had not noticed how much he missed Gerry until the possibility of seeing him again became real, the potential of resuming their friendship reopening the wound of their separation.

When he’s not strolling through the Institute and making excuses to talk to Tim and Sasha, he’s answering Gertrude’s strange questions. He won’t hear from her for hours at a time – pure bliss, those hours – and then her typically-closed door will sweep open, silently, and she’ll direct a withering inquiry at him.

“Should accelerants be used in conjunction with explosives?”

“Jonathan, how many arson cases go unsolved each year in London?”

“What would be the easiest way to destroy the Magnus Institute?”

That one gives him some pause, stapler (Gertrude has complicated feelings about staples) hovering its jaws over a Statement as he thinks. He reaches for the knowledge on how to destroy the building and finds it not missing, as the information for hurting Jude had been all those years ago, but obscured. Murky. Kept behind textured glass, its shape distorted enough that it could be one of many things and lacking the detail to truly identify it.

He shrugs and snaps the stapler closed, sealing the Statement’s fate. “I can’t tell.”

“No?” Something approaching amusement sets itself into her crow’s feet, and gives Jon the distinct feeling that she knows something he does not.

“Nope,” he pops the p, grabs a new file to look over, “There is a way; I just can’t see it.”

She doesn’t say thank you, but she does smile, which Jon thinks is pretty fucking close by Gertrude’s standards.

The best part of his day is always the end, when he can put away the files, shrug on Gerry’s old leather jacket, flip off Gertrude through her door, and walk to the library. It’s nice to look through the books; Jon can pick up any titles he’s interested in reading, grab any Leitners he feels drawn toward so he can use them like painkillers for his headache. It’s also nice to talk with Martin.

Jon isn’t used to conversations feeling like talking with someone instead of talking to them. Martin’s engagement with their chats, his willingness to follow conversational branches and eagerness to jump to new ones that catch his attention, is refreshing. It’s pleasant. Enjoyable. Utterly mortifying to reflect on.

At the end of his first week, Jon finally finds a Leitner that belongs to artefact storage, and rather than being annoyed that he can’t burn it (as a Corruption book, fire would be perfectly destructive,) Jon offers to take it to the correct department himself. First thing Monday morning, before Gertrude can give him anything else to do – yes, Martin, it’s no hassle, I’ve kept you at work long enough.

And he does it. He didn’t sneak the book home, place it in a rubbish basket, and place a burning match atop. Instead, he walked back to his desk in the Archives and set it down with a clearly marked sticky-note (DON’T FUCKING TOUCH) to await transport on Monday. The book doesn’t occupy a single square millimetre of his thoughts the entire weekend, as Martin and his thankful smile have that real estate under a monopoly.

“This was in the library,” he says dryly when he hands it over to Sasha’s gloved hands. They’re industrial things, the gloves, thick and comical compared to his bare, dark skin. He looks up say something to that effect and is met with a knowing smile, though smug feels more fitting.

“I’m impressed you know what books are in the library.”

“That does tend to come from visiting the library. Setting the bar low today, Sasha?” The familiar urge to say something more – something bitter and sharp, directed at her intelligence, that would hurt her, he’s sure – is a weak thing. It isn’t just Gerry’s urging that he does not traumatise anyone while he’s at the Institute. Jon genuinely doesn’t want to feed on Sasha, his friend.

“Oh, not at all,” she says as she walks toward a desk, waving over her shoulder for him to follow, “But a little birdie told me that you’ve been spending a lot of time in the library talking to a certain librarian.”

“You have to talk to them to get the books, it’s hardly surprising -”

“And blushing and running errands for him! Plus that perfume – or cologne, or whatever – that you’ve been wearing more and more often.”

“My -?” Christ, has he been sweating more lately? Is he nervous, or excited, to talk to Martin, like he’s some schoolchild with a crush? A crush? “Good lord, are you accusing me of liking Martin?”

“HA! I didn’t say his name! And everyone likes Martin – he’s a good librarian and nice to, like, everyone. Even book burners like you – yeah, I’ve noticed the tattoo and the matches and the sooty fingers, it’s hard not to. But you do know that Fahrenheit 451 isn’t solely about burning books, don’t you?”

Jon sighs. “Yes, I’m not sure my – ah, tattoo artist, fully understood the irony when she gave me that one.”

“As long as you know.” She shrugs, peeling off the book’s sticky note and carefully putting the book in a clear, sealable bag. “Anyway, don’t be dense! I’m accusing you of having romantic inclinations toward Martin. So is my little birdie.”

Who else talks to Jon enough to accuse him other than, “Tim?”

“Tim.” Sasha nods.

“Hmm.”

Jon reaches for his stolen matchbox for comfort, thumbing the worn cardboard as though it might calm the pulse jumping in his throat. It’s simply ridiculous that his heart can beat so fast when he’s died. It’s ridiculous that Martin can make his heart beat so fast, a man he’s scarcely known for a week!

But it does. He does.

“Yes, well, I… suppose your accusations are not – entirely. Unfounded.” It feels incredibly vulnerable to say the words, to make it real, when such an admission is exactly the information he would have once sought to ruin someone. The heart is an unstable thing to build one’s life on, and the Lightless Flame has exploited that weak foundation on his instruction before. But he’s already decided Sasha is his friend - this seems like something he ought to tell a friend. Good lord, he really is behaving like a schoolchild.

At least Sasha is as well, grinning at him the way she is.

“…how does Tim know Martin?” Jon asks.

“He proofreads and helps edit Martin’s poetry sometimes. It’s not bad, really, but it’s not my style. What he writes is very mushy and romantic, most the time.”

“Oh.”

She looks at him from the corner of her eye and raises her eyebrows. “From what I hear, the most recent mushy ones have been very Jon themed.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to look busy so Sonja will write me a good referral when I put in request for a department transfer.”

The whole walk back to the Archives, Jon considers going to the library instead. Ultimately, two things keep him on course: the fact that he is here for Gerry, and so should get back to work, and the fact that he doesn’t know what he would say to Martin if he did go to the library.

Would he ask him out? Play his hand by mentioning the poems? Follow Sasha’s example and accuse Martin of liking him? And if he chose any of those options, there was still the question of how he would say it.

His mind would go blank and he would probably, instinctively, reach through the Desolation for something to say, and the Desolation would be all too happy to speak for him. There is potential between Jon and Martin, if Tim and Sasha are right, and there is little more the Desolation likes to sully than potential. Nothing good will come of visiting Martin this instant.

He ignores the files on his desk when he sits down in favour of pulling out his phone, finding his chat with Gerry, and drafting a message. How can he ask Gerry for help with his feelings? Everything he thinks of sounds too childish. It takes him ten minutes to settle on, When are you returning to work?, and another two after that to send it.

Jon is well into half-assing a report when Gerry replies, three weeks. What a short time to heal and a long time to wait. He suspects it isn’t enough for either.

Three weeks. He can avoid Martin for three weeks, until Gerry gives him advice.

…no, he can’t. The solution comes too easily, feels too right, too approved by his Entity. If his friendship – companionship? courtship? relationship? – with Mart were a plant, three weeks of neglect would kill the work one week of care had achieved, and the Desolation would be happier for it. No, it simply won’t do.

Continuing on as normal for three weeks, however, is possible. The correct thing to do, judging by the way his chest squeezes with anxiety over the decision. Jon can keep visiting the library after work each day, finding Leitners, and talking to Martin as he has been, for three weeks. Even knowing that Martin might like him too.

Jon grabs the statements on his desk, shoves them in his rubbish basket, and throws a few matches on top to help him cope with his feelings, Gertrude’s request be damned. Tim would call that self-care, if he had the context.

So the routine continues uninterrupted: bin statements, write reports for Statements, visit Sasha and Tim as needed, answer Gertrude’s questions, and see Martin. Feeding on humans never, not once, enters the equation. His workday changes slightly when Sasha transfers to research: Jon starts visiting artefact storage to steal artefacts, using the same justification he did for Leitners, rather than learning about them. It’s impressive how much he can get away with when he has an air of confidence, a glare, and the name Gertrude Robinson to throw around if questioned. Beside that, the routine works for almost the entire three-week waiting period.

The last Thursday before Gerry is to return to the Institute, Jon comes in from a smoke break to find a man in a pinstripe suit leaning on his desk. Or, no – as he gets closer, Jon can see that it is not stripes lining the suit, but row upon unbroken row of tiny, printed eyes. Their many pupils swivel toward Jon as the stranger looks up, rehearsed surprise settling into his expression as his sight lands on Jon.

“Ah, Mr Sims! Just the man I was hoping to see. It’s a pity we couldn’t meet sooner, but as I’m sure Rosie mentioned, I haven’t been well,” he says as he offers a hand. Jon does not take it.

“You must be Elias.”

“Mr Bouchard may be more appropriate while you’re working at my Institute, but, yes.”

Jon nods. “Elias it is.”

“Very well.” His smile is polite, if thin. “It’s come to my attention that items have been going missing from artefact storage, most concerning of which is a pair of headphones. Apparently, it whispers the secrets of those around the wearer and induces a sense of paranoia, such that others might as easily know the wearer’s own secrets. Would you happen to know anything about its disappearance?”

Jon had taken those headphones home last night. As much as he enjoys destroying Web items, the Eye and its patrons (Gertrude) have been annoying him lately, and stealing an artefact of the Eye from its own altar had struck him as particularly satisfying.

Jon fixes Elias with a deadpan stare. “How should I know? It doesn’t sound like the Archives’ business.”

“Gertrude has the unfortunate habit of making everything her business, especially that which shouldn’t be.”

“Do I look like that old woman to you?”

“No, of course not.” Elias’ laugh is bright, regal, and entirely devoid of mirth. “I couldn’t possibly mistake you for her when I Know exactly who you are.”

He knows a threat when he hears one.

Jon’s hand snakes to the matchbox as he lunges for the knowledge of what would destroy Elias. Before he can get a solid grasp on either there is a sensation akin to that of his head splitting open, his eyelids being cut away, and images being pressed to his mind as quickly and as violently as gunfire. Snippets of his life, controlled by others. Martin looking at him through his lashes when he says the book has to go back to Artefact storage. Gertrude ripping answers from his throat. Gerry calling him to work at the Institute. The Lightless Flame sending him on mission after mission after mission. Jude recruiting him with a handshake and a threat. Mister Spider opening the door.

There isn’t enough air in the room. If there is, his lungs are too small, too frantic, to pull it in, his pulse too fast to allow for oxygenation. He can taste salt. Is he crying? There’s some small relief to that; he is an Avatar, but he is still human enough to cry. Or maybe that’s the problem – he is too human and he can still be controlled.

Elias’ smile is bright now. “From your contactor forms, I know you must be a wonderful employee. You’re so very good at doing what you’re told. The Institute is truly lucky to have you, Mr Sims, for however long Gertrude decides to keep you around. You’ll let me know if you hear of any more artefacts going missing, won’t you?”

Jon’s laboured breathing is the only reply.

“Good man.”

The sound of footsteps leaving at a measured, unhurried pace gives Jon time enough to get his breath back under control and scrub any tears away. With Elias gone, rational thought can return from the place it had fled to. What he’d been shown wasn’t a life lacking autonomy – save for Gertrude using the Eye to get his answers, and Mister Spider – it couldn’t be, the Web holds no claim to him since he set himself on fire. It was just snapshot of decisions influenced by others. Yes, that must be it.

(Despite his rationalisation, the fear that he still has no control over his own life still lingers.)

From his periphery Jon sees the door the Gertrude’s office swing open, her silhouette coming no further than the doorway. “Are you okay?” She sat in her office by while Elias showed him his worst fear, and all she can ask is if he’s well.

His head shakes slowly, and somewhere along the way the action devolves into laughter. If he didn’t laugh at the absurdity of it all, he would burn the Archives down in an instant of rage, and where would that leave him? Nothing to use as leverage against Gertrude compelling him, no way to make things up to Gerry, no excuse to talk to Tim and Sasha and Martin. “No, I’m not bloody okay. But I might know how to destroy that insufferable bastard, and I’m in the mood to do it, self-betterment be damned. That would make me feel okay.”

He hadn’t gotten a firm grasp of what would destroy Elias, but he had managed to snatch an idea. A fragment. It’s enough to work with, especially if Gertrude Knows more than Jon does, and he tells her as much. When he has finished speaking, Gertrude leads him through a trapdoor and finally tells him why she wanted him in the Archives.

 

The tube isn’t nearly so packed when Jon commutes into work on Sunday. Not that he officially has work - the Magnus Institute is open in a very limited capacity every weekend, predominantly to allow access to the library, and staff are only in if they are strictly necessary. He ascends the steps two at a time and, when he breezes through the front doors, Rosie isn’t shrinking away from him at the receptionist’s desk.

He takes advantage of the quiet to look into rooms he normally wouldn’t. All those plaques he passes to go to the Archives melt even further as he pushes against them, opening doors, looking at what lies within. In one room he picks up a bag, slings it over his shoulder. In another he rearranges a few of the documents. Trashcans and lit matches are a better filing system; maybe it’s his time in the Archives, but organising documents brings him such a joy.

It’s a pleasant start to the day, which goes awry when Jon sees Tim. To Tim’s credit, he looks miserable, holding coffee from the café across the road and wearing darkly tinted sunglasses, so perhaps neither of their days are going as planned.

“What are you doing at work?” Jon asks, hurrying toward his friend, fists swinging by his sides. His tone is more biting than he’s ever directed at the other, but beneath that is an undercurrent of worry.

“Hello to you too.” Tim’s exaggerated bow is enough niceties for the both of them. It almost dislodges his sunglasses and does reveal a ridiculous amount of chest as his boldly printed shirt flaps open. “Long story short, me and Sash were making bets and taking shots, and I lost. ‘M just going to finish off her research for the week. And maybe ask Maintenance to turn down the lights. Are they always this bright?”

“Good Lord, Tim, are you hungover?”

He nods solemnly. “Incredibly. ”

Jon mutters another, “Good Lord,” to himself, though it can’t solely be attributed to Tim’s current state. His presence in the Institute is more cause for concern. He can not be here today.

He dips into the Desolation just barely, the faintest drag of his fingertips over the edge of a flame, to find what would deter Tim’s productivity. The control has been easier since burning the Web from his mind. “You know, you’ll likely have to redo any work you do right now. The mighty Timothy Stoker can’t hold his alcohol well enough to be a functional drunk.”

“I can hold -” Tim presses a finger against his lips, cheeks puffing out, then points at Jon, “- My alcohol just fine, thank you. It’s the letting go I’m not so good at. ‘S why ‘m hungover.”

“Yes, well, please don’t let go over Sasha’s research or my shoes.”

“Not letting go of you, either, Jon. You’re stuck with me.”

Jon sighs, and hopes that Tim is too out of it to notice his smile. “I’ll happily be stuck with you tomorrow. Go home, Tim. Your work can wait for you.”

“I’m so good at work, you know,” Tim mumbles, and Jon nods along, because he is, “I would get it done so fast if I wasn’t hungover. So fast.”

“All the more reason to leave it for Monday.” Jon says, and this time, Tim is the one to nod his agreement. He claps Jon on the shoulder as he walks by, his usual swagger slightly off-kilter the whole way down the hall. A short time later comes the groan of the Institute’s front door, open and shut, quietened by the distance. Shorter after that, the fire alarm.

Jon’s eyes slide to a sign pointing toward the library. He has to hope that Martin, if he’s even at work today, will leave because of the alarm. Any other assumption only does Martin a disservice and makes Jon’s chest seize with worry. He shifts the bag on his shoulder as he turns away.

Nothing but closed doors pass him as he walks down the halls, footsteps echoing in the stairwell, boots thudding over the Archive’s floor. The alarm is quieter down here, and there are no flashing lights overhead to warn of danger. Jon wonders if Elias has some form of wards protecting the old, dusty Statements, or if he is simply too arrogant to worry about that sort of thing. He’s probably powerful enough for either.

Not that it will matter.

Jon flings open the trapdoor and enters the tunnels.

They are dark. Damp. Cold. If it weren’t for the promise of destruction singing in his blood, or the knowledge that this will make things up to Gerry, Jon would leave in an instant. The blistering heat of the Lightless Flame’s sermons might have been overbearing, but it was at least familiar, and it was his in the same way the gasoline on his skin is. The tunnels are the complete opposite, but the promise sings clean and clear from the stone walls, and Jon listens.

The tunnels groan and shift, and even in the darkness Jon can see that there is now a path forward that had not been there before. He blames the uncomfortable draft for making his arm hairs stand on end, and begins to walk.

One hand settles on his well-warn matchbox, the other on his phone. His screen tells him he has no reception, but when he calls Gerry it goes through anyway, the ringing a welcoming distraction from the constant sound of stone grinding over stone. Even better is when the ringing gives way to Gerry’s voice.

They talk as Jon walks, the rumbling dimming slightly as he focuses on the conversation. Apparently, Gerry is well enough to be out and about and is at a coffee shop as they speak, for which Jon is glad, and he says as much, and Gerry replies by comparing it to the rounds of chemo he did over the years. He asks how Jon is finding the job, and Jon asks how he should handle his feelings for Martin.

Their chatter is aimless but genuine, constant but easy. The kind of comfortable, habitual call that doesn’t have Gerry asking why Jon called, because he doesn’t need to. No hard questions or explanations. All the call has is conversation.

The incessant background noise of the shifting walls slows, but does not stop, and the darkness before him shrinks in size before coming to an end. The stone and closely packed dirt is precisely the same as all the other walls Jon had gone past, save for a vein of bright yellow pipe. It looks entirely too modern to be part of the Magnus Institute, and the dirt around it is looser than the rest, as though it had recently been disturbed and packed back into place, the efforts of someone trying to hide their snooping. It isn’t too far from the truth.

Gasoline perfumes the air and the crackling, popping, spitting symphony of fire rises in his blood as his hand brushes over the gas main. The dust and dirt and grime falls away as glass and soot and ash. Jon doesn’t have to ask if this is what will destroy the Magnus Institute, the building looming overhead, to know that it is. The answer is pushed into his mind with glee.

It’s only when he wets his lips to speak that he realises Gerry has been saying his name. “I’ll, ah,” the hand resting against his matchbox jumps to his bag strap, slides it down his arm until it lands on the floor with a thud, “I’ll talk to you later.”

He zips the bag open, revealing a mess of plastic explosives and wires and detonators. Keeping the Institute in mind, Jon begins to assemble the bag’s contents against the bright yellow pipe. It requires very little conscious input, instructions from books and lectures seamlessly guiding his hands. The precise amount of explosives to bring down the tunnels and the building overhead; optimal positioning of the wires to connect everything.

It’s soothing. Simple. As natural as breathing. Jon can scarcely hear the shifting walls over the roar of blood in his ears. Can barely smell the dirt and the damp over the gasoline. He can feel the flesh on his fingers wanting to melt into the explosives, the bring the C4 into himself and himself into the fire that will follow, and it takes more effort to keep his hands solid than to orchestrate the building’s destruction.

Jon is just ensuring the detonator is wired correctly when a voice cuts through the rumbling of the walls and the crackling of the Desolation’s call.

“For an Avatar, you show a truly remarkable amount of empathy. A pity the civilians won’t know to thank you for it,” Elias says, “I suppose my gratitude will have to do. Thank you, Jonathan, for setting off the alarms and failing to close the trap door behind you, because I don’t think I would have found you otherwise.”

Jon turns to look at Elias as he approaches, footsteps audible over the low shifting only now that he knows to listen for it. The light he carries, swinging from his fist like a punch, sets a gleam to his teeth and a smug expression from the hollows of his face. It does not need to add anything to his eyes, as they glow on their own.

“Stay back, or the building won’t be the only thing to explode.” Jon’s grip tightens on the detonator.

Elias sweeps his hands wide and continues his advance. “There’s no need for that. I think you and I got off on the wrong foot, don’t you? It’s a fault of our own; I avoided you and showed you your greatest fear, you stole from me and tried to find my weakness. I believe we can move past that – well, so long as you don’t blow anything up.

“You’ll find that I’m well-versed in working with people I do not particularly like. Gertrude Robinson, for one, but many more that you might not recognise. You could join that list. Your skillset is useful enough to demand tolerance.” He stands only a few paces away, now, close enough that the tunnels are no competition for Elias’ voice. “In turn, I can give you access to so many other Entities. Imagine what you could do if you were not limited to the Desolation and the Eye! There is so much more for you to learn about destruction, Jon, and I can give that knowledge to you, if only you do not burn this bridge.”

A gunshot splits the air. Jon sees more than hears Elias gasp, grabbing at his shoulder, surprise bleeding into anger into fear as red coats his hand.

Jon can’t hear Gertrude over the ringing in his ears, but he can feel that there are no longer any vibrations to hide her footsteps. He watches her place the gun in her cardigan, take the earplugs from her ears, pull The Seven Lamps of Architecture from where it had been tucked against her body and read a short sentence. The wall behind Elias lurches forward and envelops his torso, pinning him like a moth to a board.

From how long her lips spend moving, Gertrude is either gloating, or explaining their plan to destroy the Magnus Institute. Between the stories from Gerry and accounts given in Statements, Gertrude had known that Jon would be the final piece she needed to crush the Eye’s stronghold. When he couldn’t identify the gas main beneath the building as the best way to destroy the Magnus Institute, she figured the tunnels kept it safe from Elias’ gaze, too.

Only, she and Jon both had made a mistake in assuming the building had to be destroyed. As Jonah Magnus’ enterprise (that had meant very little to Jon), the Institute could be rebuilt if it fell, the Archives scavenged and salvaged for some new, unsuspecting Archivist to inherit. No, to destroy the Magnus Institute as the orbit for the Eye, they had to cut off its head, so to speak.

There is nothing Jonah Magnus fears more than death, and nothing that would kill him more than severing his connection to his patron Entity. That is what would destroy the Magnus Institute.

When Gertrude produces an awl from her cardigan and raises it to Elias’ – Jonah’s – glowing eyes, Jon begins his walk back to the trap door. The unused detonator burns in his hand, so it slips it into his pocket, beside the ever-present matchbox.

Out on the street, cranky academics and a large, ginger-haired, freckled librarian mill about, and Jon’s ears have recovered enough to hear an anxious voice placating annoyed ones. Relief floods Jon to realise the fire alarm had, indeed, worked two-fold, luring Elias into the tunnels and herding everyone else outside. No one innocent would be hurt today, not because of him. Martin would not be hurt.

Remembering his conversation with Gerry, he hurries down the steps to stand at Martin’s side.

“Martin,” Jon begins, only to be cut off by an academic demanding he wait his turn. Martin uses his politest voice to tell said academic to wait before turning his attention to Jon.

“Jon, this isn’t a great time to be trying to steal library books,” he says, lips quirking fondly. “Or, er, it might be, since there’s no one inside, but I’m a bit busy to help you with it.”

“I can see that. Actually, I came over to ask if you’d like to go out for coffee, sometime?”

Martin blinks. “What?”

“Or tea, instead, since you prefer it, but I’m told coffee dates are good first dates.” He watches Martin as he fumbles with his sweater sleeve, eventually shoving it far enough up his arm to pinch himself. Jon smiles wryly and adds, “Don’t tell me you don’t know what a date is.”

“No, nope! I know what they are!” Martin’s voice is higher than normal. “A date? With me?”

“Yes, Martin, with you,” Jon rolls his eyes, but it’s less effective for the affection in his voice. “Does after work suit you?”

Apparently, it does.

He leaves Martin to his work of wrangling disgruntled academics, a new number in his phone and a lightness in his step, and follows the sight of a cardiganed woman slipping into the coffee shop across the street. The bell chimes cheerily as the door opens, and the doorhandle shines red as the door swings shut. Jon makes a face at both of these things as he enters.

Gertrude, wiping her hands on some napkins, and Gerry, far more scarred than Jon remembers, sit at a table in the corner. They make for a strange pair, and a stranger trio once he joins them.

“Have you been here all day?” Jon asks Gerry, taking in the array of paper bags, cups, mugs, and crumbs already littering the table. He absently wonders what Gerry has said, or done, to keep the staff from clearing them away. If it has anything to do with Mary.

Gerry just raises a pierced eyebrow and replies, “Have you had my leather jacket this whole time?”

“Touché.”

“Boys,” Gertrude interjects, “It has been a long day, and I could do without the bickering.”

“It’s 11am.” As Jon points this out, Gertrude gives him a withering look and an Institute credit card. Obligingly, and after giving her the middle finger in return, he goes and orders them all cappuccinos, to go. The barista is firm in their denial of selling Irish coffees.

They drink in silence for a few moments.

Gertrude sets her drink down, freeing her hands to fold neatly in her lap. Beside adding to her grandmotherly appearance, if you ignore the stern expression, it hides the dark crimson still flecking her cuticles. “Jonathan, are you certain that only the Archives will be destroyed?”

“Trust me, I was very clear on my intent: there’s enough explosives to take out the building immediately above the gas main. Just the Archives, which I’ve wanted to burn since day one, by the way, Gerry, and likely most of the tunnels. That’s all.”

“The tunnels are an… unfortunate casualty, I must admit, but very well. I’ll break the bad news to my associate when I return his book.”

“You sure the detonator will work from here?” Gerry peers at Jon from over the lid of his cup, which does nothing to muffle his question or hide his scepticism. Jon nudges him with his foot.

“It would work from the other side of the world. It’s – hard to describe, but the Desolation is excited for this to happen.” Huffed laughter. “Or perhaps that’s just me. I’ll be happy to put the Archives behind us all.”

Jon’s fingers are buzzing as he reaches for the detonator, warm to the touch, enough so to burn if he were entirely human, and the sensation feels right as his hand closes around it. He doesn’t remove the detonator from his pocket. He isn’t sure the Lightless Flame will protect him, given his time in the Archives with Gertrude, if he is too careless or blatant about this. They just might oust him from their ranks.

The thought is oddly welcome.

Gerry nudges him back, once the quiet has stretched to his limits. “Didn’t think your lot got cold feet.”

Jon hopes the Institute’s protocols include cutting the workday short for emergencies, and, beyond that, hopes the Archives in ruins constitutes one. After all, he has a date to get to.

It’s blissfully easy to activate the detonator, a quick, miniscule exertion of force that creates one far greater once the signal transmits. Gerry’s plates and cups rattle on the table as, through the window, the Magnus Institute shudders as though someone had stepped on its grave. It’s a beautiful chain of events; the rumble, the pedestrians pausing, the smoke billowing from open windows in earnest, the firefighters showing up in response to the initial fire alarm, now too late to do anything but prevent the damage from claiming more of the building. Jon almost wishes he hadn’t set off the alarms, but, seeing Gerry grin at the sight and knowing Martin is safe because of it, he can’t bring himself to regret it.

Later that afternoon, while he and Martin share a pot of tea and a conversation, the café’s television displays the Magnus Institute on the news, and Jon doesn’t even notice.

Notes:

This chapter is so much later than I wanted it to be, but also twice the length of the last one, so it almost evens out?? At any rate, thank you all for kudosing, commenting, bookmarking, and reading! We made it to the end!! Jon speed-ran his friendships and romance by not being everyone's boss!!!

This is the end of the story proper, but as I mentioned last chapter, I'll probably have a fic for snippets and scenes that didn't make it in or that y'all want to see. As a treat <3

Notes:

Do you ever think 'haha wouldn't it be neat if x' and suddenly find yourself writing a fic?? I think that explains my take Desolation!Jon

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of bridges, burnt and built