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He lies in the dark and cries quietly. Can’t cry loudly, not like this. Shouldn’t cry loudly, either. It’s making noise that brought this on him. He screams when he has nightmares and bursts into tears for no reason and he cannot stop talking about Mr. Spider. That’s what really made Nana do this. Should’ve shut up. Should’ve learned to keep his mouth closed without needing to have it closed for him. Should’ve worked out how to lie so he wouldn’t keep getting told he’s lying.
He can hear Nana through the wall now, her tiny abrupt snores. She’s been asleep for a while.
He uncurls himself and slips silently off the bed. He’s shivering. It’s not even cold, but he hasn’t been able to stop shivering since Nana got out the needle and thread. His bedroom door doesn’t make a sound as he opens it, and he steps easily over the floorboards that squeak. He doesn’t bother to stop in the kitchen, the way he used to sometimes, if he remembered, before leaving the house. He can’t eat like this. He wonders how Nana planned to feed him, and thinks that maybe she didn’t.
Jon opens the back door and steps out, still silent, into the night.
*
Jon lies in the dark and cries quietly. He hadn’t meant to do it. He hadn’t. He hadn’t. He’d just been so hungry, not for food, but for knowledge. For the delicious, freshly told story of someone’s worst trauma. For the feeling of letting his compulsion sink deep into their mind and tug it out of them.
Everybody who’s ever called him a monster is right. Tim was right. Daisy was right. Georgie’s right and Melanie’s right and Basira’s right and Martin never actually called him that but if he’s ever thought it, even just once, even briefly, then he’s right too.
He should have learned how to shut up. More than twenty years, and he’s still never learned how to keep his mouth closed when he ought to. So much easier to open it, to pry and poke and prod until people spill their secrets whether they want to or not. Not just easy, but satisfying, wonderful. Delicious. He never learned the self control he ought to have. Never bothered to, after they took him away from Nana. Nana would have taught him.
Jon opens his eyes.
Maybe Nana did teach him. Maybe Nana was right all along. Maybe Jon doesn’t need to be a monster, and maybe he already knows everything he needs to know to stop that from happening.
He uncurls himself and slips silently off the camp bed in document storage. He doesn’t bother to step around floorboards that creak. Melanie and Basira are asleep in their own private, separate, corners of the archives, all of them alone even when they’re living in such close proximity, and a few creaks won’t wake them. Even if they did, neither would care what Jon is doing.
It’s easy, then, to make his way to the break room, where the first aid kit is kept. He knows without needing to look that there are needles and suture thread in there, purchased by Basira and already used more than once. There’s plenty left, though. More than enough for Jon’s requirements. He opens the first aid kit, which, these days in the archives, isn’t one of the usual green bags with the white cross, but a large cardboard box stuffed to the brim with every kind of first aid supply that could be imagined. Jon has to dig around for a while before he finally emerges with a small box containing a series of individually packaged suture needles and another with threads. He puts everything else back into the cardboard box as tidily as he can, then picks up his supplies and carries them through to the loo. This seems like the sort of thing best done with the help of a mirror.
Once he’s there, though, Jon finds himself hesitating. Is he really going to…?
Yes. Yes, he is. When he opens his mouth, he hurts people. That’s the truth of the matter. It’s been true since he was eight years old, it just took him a very, very long time to realise it. It took becoming a monster.
It won’t take any longer.
Jon opens the box of needles and selects one more or less at random. He dithers a moment over the threads, not sure which will be best, and then, once more at random, picks out a pink packet and tears it open. He threads the needle. Pauses a moment to let his hands stop shaking. He needs to be steady for this. Needs to be careful. Does not need to make mistakes. A few deep, slow breaths in and out, and his hand is as steady as it’s going to be.
He begins.
In hindsight, maybe it would have gone better if Jon had googled how to stitch skin beforehand, or if he’d taken some painkillers, or not used the damn mirror. The mirror means he knows where the needle needs to go, can watch and make sure he stitches in the right places, but it also means he can see everything. The way the stitches pull at his skin, the unnatural look of his mouth as it’s gradually, painstakingly, sealed closed.
The blood.
God, the blood. It runs in thin rivulets over Jon’s lips, and then in thick crimson streams. It dribbles off his chin and splashes down into the sink below, and onto the t-shirt he was, before this, trying to sleep in. It’s pale pink with the What the Ghost? logo in white on the front, but by the time Jon’s finished, it’s streaked and splattered with bright red blood. His hands, too, are slick with it. It runs down them, past his wrists, drips languidly to the floor from his elbows.
It can’t be supposed to bleed this much. That, Jon supposes, is where the googling would have helped. Or if the Eye had cared to drop the knowledge into his head, how helpful it would have been. But, of course, the Eye does not, cannot approve of what he’s just done.
He’s done it, though. It doesn’t matter what the Eye thinks. He cannot speak. Cannot compel. Cannot force people’s trauma out of them and drink it in, leaving them broken and traumatised. He’s still a monster, he supposes, because there’s no taking back the things he’s already done, and there’s no bringing back his humanity. But now he’s a monster with a muzzle. Better than a monster without.
Well. He’s finished now. Nothing to do but clean up after himself and go back to bed.
Somehow, Jon can’t. He drops the needle and what’s left of the thread into the sink. God, there’s so much blood. And so much pain. How can a few little stitches hurt so much? His whole head blazes with it. His throat works with sobs that he can no longer give voice to. His hands land on the edge of the sink and he doubles over, suddenly seeing spots, light-headed. For a long, horrible minute, he thinks he’s going to throw up, and he can’t, he can’t, not with his mouth sewn shut, he literally can’t, except that his stomach hasn’t got the message, still wants to empty itself.
He screws his eyes shut and breathes as slowly as he can through his nose. Something’s wrong, though. It’s not working. He can’t suck in enough oxygen. He breathes more quickly, more deeply, trying desperately to fill his lungs. It hurts. It hurts so much, worse now that he’s finished, somehow, than it did while he was sewing himself up. So badly that Jon can’t think properly. Still can’t breathe properly, either.
His eyes open and there’s the blood, dripping slowly down the sink and disappearing down the plug hole. And too close to his nose, he can smell it, unless that’s the stuff he knows is still on his face, drying crustily over stitches and skin. All of it’s bad, the sharp little scent of it filling up his nostrils, his lungs, the sight of it filling up his vision.
Jon feels strange. Wrong. The sink is tipping oddly. His sight fractures for a moment, everything turning to jagged shards, the scarlet liquid in the sink and the white porcelain and the shining mirror all mixed up. His knees hit the floor.
I’m about to faint, Jon thinks, a small, cold voice somewhere in the back of his own mind. Huh.
But there are worse things that could happen. In the grand scheme of bad things that have happened to Jon, fainting doesn’t come anywhere close to the top ten. The last conscious thought he has as his hands hit the floor, and then his face, is:
Thank you, Nana.