Work Text:
It’s not exactly a secret to anyone in the research department that Jon doesn’t like spiders. He’s not dramatic about it or anything, but after a while most everyone has, at one point or another, seen his unconcealed disgust and subsequent squashing of the little eight-legged intruders. Which is fine; Jon doesn’t care if his coworkers have noticed his disdain for arachnids. He’s hardly the only one in the office who dislikes spiders, after all.
It’s also not a secret that Jon doesn’t get on terribly well with most of his coworkers. He’s brusque, occasionally borderline rude, and doesn’t bother with useless things like small talk. This is also fine; Jon doesn’t care if his coworkers like him. Getting people to like you is a complicated and exhausting endeavor that, in Jon’s opinion, is usually more trouble than it’s worth. He’s here to do his job, and his ability to do it is unaffected by his coworkers opinions of him.
Anyways, he and Tim get on fine, and Jon thinks one friendly coworker is plenty. Frankly, if he had any more coworkers that talked to him as frequently and as enthusiastically as Tim does, he’d be unlikely to ever get any work done.
Jon comes into work in the morning already in a bad mood. He’s tired— he hadn’t slept well last night. It was that same nightmare again, of course, the one he hasn’t been able to shake since he was eight years old. At least it plagues him much less frequently now than it used to. He’ll go months at a time now without having it, but when he does, it’s a guarantee that sleep is a lost cause for the rest of the night. He’d spent most of the night wide awake, staring at the darkened doorway of his bedroom, convincing himself that the flickering shadows around the doorframe were just that and not the long, spindly legs that some irrational part of his mind insisted they were.
When Jon sits down and begins looking over the statement he’s been assigned to research, he only gets about a paragraph in before he’s cursing under his breath and fighting the urge to crumple the whole thing up and toss it in the wastepaper bin.
Tim, whose desk is beside Jon’s, quirks an eyebrow at him.
“That bad?” He asks, glancing curiously over at papers Jon’s holding.
For a moment, Jon is tempted to ask Tim to switch statements with him. Tim probably wouldn’t mind, and whatever he’s got today can’t be worse than what Jon’s been assigned.
It’s his pride that prevents him from doing so.
Jon sighs. “Not really, just… an unpleasant one. But that’s sort of par for the course here, isn’t it?” He’s trying for levity, but it comes out bitter instead.
Tim shrugs sympathetically in reply, and then they’re both back to working on their assignments in silence. Jon almost wishes the conversation had continued. Maybe he could’ve gotten Tim to regale him with one of his long, rambling anecdotes and avoided having to actually read through the two pages of paper-clipped bullshit on his desk.
But alas, there’s no such distraction. So Jon takes a deep breath, steels himself, and begins to read.
“It stared down at me with what seemed to be hundreds of beady, black eyes as I crouched, frozen in place by sheer terror.
It was so big. I’d never imagined before what it felt like to be an insect, caught and immobilized in a spider’s web, but now I didn’t have to.
As the thing advanced towards me on its thin, jointed legs I saw its chelicerae flex, and I somehow knew that it was essentially licking its lips. Salivating in anticipation of tearing into my flesh.
Most people think spiders drink their prey’s blood. But that’s a myth, you know? It’s worse than that. Spiders vomit acid onto their prey once it’s been immobilized. Can you imagine what that would feel like? The acid coating your skin, burning, bubbling, liquifying you until you’re nothing but a pool of viscera.
That’s when they start eating you. Chewing you up with their external jaws ‘til you’re nothing but a puddle of liquid meat, ready to be slurped into their ravenous maw.”
The pen Jon had been holding slips from his numb fingers and rolls off his desk.
The clatter of plastic on wood startles him out of his trance, and Jon abruptly becomes aware of several things.
First, he can’t breathe. His chest is tight and painful, his lungs refusing to expand enough to let him draw more than the shallowest of breaths. Second, there are dark spots encroaching on the edges of his vision, and he’s horribly dizzy despite the fact that he’s sitting down. And third— he’s going to throw up. Very soon. His jaw feels heavy and there’s acrid saliva pooling under his tongue.
Jon lurches to his feet and immediately has to grip the edge of his desk to keep from collapsing as a wave of vertigo breaks over him.
Even in his current state of panicked distraction, Jon can feel his coworkers looking at him as he half-sprints, half-stumbles from the room. He needs to get out of here, needs to find somewhere he can have this now-inevitable breakdown in private.
It’s more due to instinct than any conscious decision that Jon ends up at the door to the Institute’s small courtyard. He pushes it open bodily and nearly trips over the threshold in his haste to get outside.
As soon as his feet hit the concrete of the path that surrounds the courtyard, Jon is bent over with his hands braced on his knees, desperately trying to draw a full breath.
He’s going to pass out if he can’t stop hyperventilating. Jon tries to remember the breathing exercises Georgie had taught him back in university, but his mind is blank save for the terrifying, burned-in image of the large, many-legged predator that’s about to eat him. That should’ve eaten him.
This, Jon knows, is what the boy who took the book from him must have seen in his last moments. Was he alive when his skin had been liquified? Had he felt the acid eating into his flesh, his bones? Was he conscious as he was macerated by Mr. Spider’s jaws, reduced to a bloody, slimy pulp?
Jon collapses to his knees, a painful, breathless sob working its way out of his throat. He can’t breathe. He feels like he’s going to die.
He’s so immersed in his own panicked misery that he doesn’t hear the door open behind him, doesn’t notice the footsteps approaching. When a hand lands on his shoulder he startles badly and scrambles around to face his attacker. The sudden movement is enough to make his vision go almost completely black, and he spends a horrible minute blinking the dark spots away before he recognizes the face of the person crouched in front of him.
Tim.
Jon is distantly aware that Tim’s mouth is moving, which means he must be saying something, but Jon can’t decipher any of the words over the rush of blood in his ears. To Jon’s utter humiliation, another sob rips its way out of his throat. Hot, panicked tears spill down his face as he heaves for breath, trembling fingers clenched hard against the fabric of his trousers.
After an indeterminate amount of time spent crying and struggling to breathe, Jon becomes aware of the fact that Tim is running a hand up and down his back in a slow, rhythmic motion. The rush of Jon’s pulse in his ears has quieted down enough that he’s finally able to hear some of what Tim’s saying.
“Okay, you’re okay. There you go, I’ve got you.” Tim’s voice is gentler than Jon’s ever heard it, quiet and soothing, completely devoid of its usual manic energy. “It’s gonna be okay, deep breaths. There you go.”
Jon finds that the quiet stream of background noise in combination with Tim’s hand on his back actually helps to ground him somewhat, and after a few minutes he’s able to slow his breathing enough that he no longer feels in imminent danger of losing consciousness.
He can’t bring himself to look at Tim, so he keeps his gaze on the ground and roughly scrubs a hand over his face. He lets out a shuddering breath, the tension in his muscles starting to dissipate suddenly enough that he has to brace a hand on the ground beside him so that he doesn’t tip over.
Tim’s hand stills against Jon’s back.
“Jon? Hey, you back with me?” Tim’s voice is still uncharacteristically soft, and concern is visible on his face when Jon finally manages to force himself to look over and meet his eyes.
Not quite trusting himself to speak, Jon just nods. His muscles ache, and he shifts to sit on the concrete in a marginally more comfortable position.
When it becomes clear that Tim’s waiting for Jon to respond verbally, Jon clears his throat. “I’m… doing better now,” he says, cringing internally at how wrecked his voice sounds. “Thank you,” he whispers, after a beat. “For… for helping.”
Tim sighs, some of the tension beginning to bleed from his frame as well.
“You don’t have to thank me, Jon. You’re my friend— even if you weren’t, I’d hate to let you go through something like that alone.”
Tim pauses, fidgeting with the bracelet on his wrist for a moment before looking back up at Jon.
“Can I ask what happened? It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me, just…” pausing, Tim seems unsure whether he should continue. Finally, he asks, “It was the statement, right?”
Jon looks away.
“Yeah,” he manages, deliberately keeping his breaths even. He doesn’t want to talk about the statement, doesn’t want to think about it, terrified that it might start the cycle of panic all over again. But Tim has just spent God-knows-how-long sitting on the ground with him, comforting him through a panic attack of truly spectacular proportions, so Jon figures he owes him a bit of an explanation.
Swallowing, Jon continues, “Ah, it was one about—“
“Spiders,” Tim interrupts, grim. “I… glanced over it, after you left.”
“Right,” Jon says after a moment. “It wasn’t just that it was about— well. It was… worse. Than they usually are.”
He doesn’t want Tim to think he’s a pathetic mess who falls apart at the slightest mention of arachnids, but he can’t bring himself to explain any further. If he thinks too hard about the actual content of the statement, he’s reasonably sure he’ll end up in much the same state as he’d been in a few minutes ago.
He’s pulled from his thoughts by Tim’s voice, which has an unusually tentative quality to it as he speaks.
“Jon, I think— well, I’m not sure if this will make it better or worse, but I think— I’m pretty sure that the statement wasn’t… legitimate. As I was leaving the office to come find you, I overheard David and a few others talking, and…” There’s a hardness to Tim’s voice now, a barely-concealed anger behind the mask of calm he’s been wearing for Jon’s sake.
“I think they wrote it as some kind of fucked up prank— to mess with you, I guess. Which is bullshit, that those fucking pricks thinking they can just— and if they think they’re going to get away with this without getting reported, they’re sorely fucking mistaken— not that the Institute’s big on discipline, but we can file a complaint with HR, and if they don’t— well, I’d be more than happy to take matters into my own hands…”
Whatever Tim says after ‘some kind of fucked up prank’ is lost to Jon’s ears. His head is spinning again, this time with a strange, overwhelming cocktail of anger and embarrassment and confusion and above all else, sheer relief.
Because what Tim had said meant the statement hadn’t been real. That it hadn’t really happened to someone. That it might not have been like that for the boy who took the book. It might’ve been quick. Christ, Jon hopes it was quick. He hopes it was quick, and nothing like the horrific fiction that his coworkers had evidently concocted.
It occurs to Jon that he should probably be angry, irate even, knowing the true origin of the statement. But the relief of knowing that it hadn’t been real is so intense that it drowns out everything else, and Jon exhales shakily. The relief takes up so much space inside him that he can only find it in himself to be vaguely embarrassed when he sniffles involuntarily, tears beginning to drip down his cheeks again.
This time, Tim wraps his arms around him, and Jon lets himself lean into the warmth and solidity, suddenly overcome by bone-deep exhaustion. He feels slightly guilty as his tears soak into Tim’s brightly colored dress shirt, but can’t bring himself to pull away from the comfort of the embrace— not just yet.
Later, when Jon’s calmed down, Tim will give him a ride home. On the spur of the moment, Jon will invite Tim inside, and they’ll spend the evening on Jon’s couch watching documentaries and eating takeout.
Later, as the evening light filters in through the windows of Jon’s apartment, Jon will tell Tim about Mr. Spider. Tim, in turn, will tell Jon about the circus, and about Danny.
Nothing will ever be the same again.
Later, when he and Tim are by each other’s side, steadfast despite the unraveling of everything around them, Jon won’t be able to imagine a universe in which it turned out any other way.