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Being a dark-skinned and notably different child in England in the 1990s was, to Jon’s mind, another one of the many peculiarities he was saddled with, and a cruel irony that was mostly because of his mother.
England was England. The sky was perpetually undecided between drizzle and disappointment. The buses were red in a way that felt aggressively cheerful. His grandmother’s house ticked and sighed and smelled faintly of starch and old paper. These were constants. And Jon—brown-skinned, sharp-eyed, solemn—was simply another fact among them.
He knew he was peculiar. That much was obvious. He preferred footnotes to football, biographies to bicycles. He spoke in full sentences. He corrected teachers with the anxious politeness of someone who could not bear an error to exist unchallenged. Other children orbited noise; Jon orbited information. If there was a reason he did not quite fit, surely it was that.
Surely it was not his skin colour.
Children do not begin with mirrors; they begin with stories.
Jon’s story, as far as he understood it, involved a father who died too early to count properly in his memory—more a sepia photograph than a man—a mother who was always described as “unwell” in the careful, adult way that meant both fragile and inconvenient, and a grandmother who had inherited them all like an unexpected parcel delivered without return postage.
His parents ceased to be present after he turned five, with his mother gone in a funeral he remembered mostly for the smell of lilies and the way everyone spoke too softly, as if loudness might disturb the dead.
After that, it was only the two of them. He and his grandmother.
But order remained.
Order sat at the kitchen table and drank tea at four o’clock precisely. Order folded his jumpers into symmetrical thirds and corrected his pronunciation of “bath.” Order believed in proper collars and polished shoes and the quiet dignity of not discussing unpleasantness in front of neighbours.
Order had a name, of course. It was Grandmother.
Jon’s mother had wanted his hair long.
This was told to him once, in passing, as though it were a trivial footnote in an otherwise sensible narrative.
“She thought it was proper for a child to wear his hair long,” his grandmother said, wrestling a comb through a riot of dark curls that snapped and coiled with stubborn enthusiasm. “I will never understand your father, you know that? Runs off to travel the world and brings back some girl without even telling me they’d had a courthouse wedding while he was abroad.”
The comb snagged. Jon hissed softly.
“Hold still.”
He held still.
He had pieced together the outline of his parents the way one pieces together a fairy tale from fragments: a young Englishman; a Māori woman with a constitution too delicate for English winters. A whirlwind romance. A quiet ceremony. A child.
A child that had been him.
She had been ill since before he was born, he was told.
He was born too early.
And then illness. Always illness, in the telling. As though his mother had been composed entirely of glass and prescriptions.
“She wasn’t suited to Bournemouth," his grandmother would say, not unkindly. “Some people aren’t.”
Jon wondered, sometimes, whether Bournemouth had been suited to her. If his mother had carried that other land inside her, it had been carefully boxed away when she crossed the threshold. What remained were the curls on Jon’s head and the brown of his skin—evidence that refused to be tidied.
His grandmother approached these evidences with brisk practicality.
“You’ll thank me when you’re older,” she muttered, parting his hair with military precision. “No one takes a scruffy child seriously.”
Jon did not particularly mind the ritual. He liked the way her fingers were firm and sure, the way the comb’s teeth made orderly lines through chaos. It felt like being translated into a language the house understood.
Still, he noticed the way strangers looked at them when they walked together. The slight hesitation before a smile. The assumption that he must belong to someone else.
Once, at the grocer’s, a woman leaned down and asked him, conspiratorially, “Are you adopted, then?”
Jon blinked. He had not considered this possibility.
“My grandmother raised me,” he said carefully.
The woman’s smile faltered. “Oh.”
That evening, he asked.
“Gran?”
“Yes?”
“Did you adopt me?”
The teacup paused midair.
“No,” she said, after a moment. “You are my grandson.”
The emphasis was precise. Final.
He accepted this as law.
But children, even those raised on order, have a talent for noticing what is not said.
He noticed that his father was always described in verbs—travelled, married, insisted, died—while his mother was described in adjectives—beautiful, fragile, foreign, tired. He noticed that his own reflection seemed to belong more to one half of the story than the other.
In the only photograph his grandmother kept, his father looked pale and laughing, arm thrown carelessly around a woman with skin like polished wood and hair that made Jon’s curls look tame. They stood on what appeared to be a beach, wind tangling everything indiscriminately.
He studied that photograph often.
“Don’t stare,” his grandmother would say if she caught him. “You’ll wear it out.”
Children begin with stories, but as they grow, they realise stories have edges. Gaps.
Children, Jon discovered, are very fond of queens and executioners. They delight in declaring what is proper and what must be cut off. One boy—older, louder, already fluent in hierarchy—took a long look at Jon’s curls and announced, to the general court, that he looked like a girl.
Like something wild.
Like something that did not belong in a blazer and tie.
The laughter that followed was not loud, precisely. It was worse than that. It was delighted. It was shared. It bounced from child to child until Jon could feel it pressing against his skin.
He went home in a silence so tight it hummed.
Upstairs, in the bathroom with its pale blue tiles and unforgiving mirror, he regarded himself. The glass offered no commentary. It simply reflected: brown skin against cold porcelain; dark eyes too serious for eight years old; hair that framed his face in soft rebellion.
He lifted a curl and let it spring back.
He imagined, briefly, a decree: Off with it.
The sewing scissors were in the cabinet. They were not meant for hair, but they would do. Jon knew his grandmother had always believed in making do.
The first snip was loud in the small room. A curl fell into the sink like a question mark. He cut again, faster now. The scissors caught and tugged; the curls resisted, determined to remain themselves. He cut shorter. And shorter still.
Hair slid down the porcelain and gathered at his feet in dark commas and spirals, as though the story of him were being edited in real time. He cleaned up after himself and didn’t leave a single piece of hair on the ground or in the sink. When he descended the stairs, uneven and bristling, his grandmother looked up.
There are moments when adults understand everything without being told. This was one of them.
“Oh, Jonathan,” she said softly.
Not angry. Not surprised. Simply aware.
She fetched the proper scissors. Sat him at the kitchen table beneath the yellow light. The house seemed to lean in to watch. Her hands were brisk, efficient, as she evened the jagged edges. She did not ask why. She did not say you shouldn’t have. Jon had discovered another rule entirely: be just right. Not too different. Not too noticeable. Not too much.
His hair grew back, but never again quite so long.
He sharpened himself instead. If he could not control the way the world looked at his skin, he could control the way it heard his voice. He spoke crisply. He cited sources. He earned top marks. Teachers described him as “articulate,” as though he were performing a trick.
Well, he performed it well.
It was easier to study than to be studied.
He did not resent his grandmother, however brisk her manner. She was something steadier. A lighthouse, perhaps, stern and unyielding against a tide she could not entirely comprehend. She could not change the way the world tilted when he entered a room. What she could offer was armour: perfect grammar, ironed shirts, an ingrained refusal to apologise for his presence.
Belonging, she taught him, was something one asserted.
And yet.
The first time he had encountered the police, he had been eight years old and lost.
He remembered it in fragments: the way the street had seemed to tilt and stretch, terraced houses blurring into one another; the rising, humiliating panic in his throat; the sudden, towering presence of two officers. Their uniforms had been impossibly dark, their radios crackling like disembodied insects.
“Where’s your mum, then?” one had asked.
“My grandmother,” Jon had corrected automatically.
He remembered the way they’d held his shoulders—not roughly, but firmly, as though he might bolt. The way passersby had slowed, assessing. The relief and embarrassment of being delivered back to his grandmother’s doorstep like a misplaced parcel.
She had thanked them in clipped tones and shut the door with unnecessary force. Then she had crouched in front of him, hands on his arms, eyes searching.
“You do not wander,” she had said, voice tight. “Do you understand me?”
He had nodded.
As he grew older, he began to suspect somewhere, beneath the neat haircut and the immaculate diction, beneath the armour of excellence and the careful posture, the boy with the halo of curls still existed.
Adolescence did not so much arrive as rearrange him.
By thirteen, Jon had perfected the art of subtraction.
The curls were kept close to the scalp now—trimmed regularly, deliberately unremarkable. He had experimented once with letting them grow a little longer again, just to see, but the mirror had felt too loud about it. Too declarative. So he pared them back down to something that would not draw commentary.
If teachers asked about his background, he offered clipped, efficient answers that led nowhere.
“Bournemouth,” he would say.
“But originally—?”
“Bournemouth.”
It became a small, private spell. If he insisted on being ordinary, perhaps the world would oblige.
He told himself this was maturity. Adaptation. Evolution, even. He read enough history to know that survival often belonged to the ones who assimilated most effectively. There was a clinical satisfaction in it. A sense of having solved a problem.
By sixteen, he could pass through most spaces without immediate friction. Teachers liked him. University brochures began arriving in thick, glossy stacks. He cultivated a reputation for being intimidatingly intelligent and socially disinterested. It was safer to be aloof than excluded.
And yet there were cracks.
They appeared in shop windows, in the way security guards’ gazes lingered half a beat too long. In the way strangers’ eyes tracked him on the Tube, not openly hostile but alert. As though he were a variable.
He catalogued these moments the way he catalogued everything else. Data points. Anecdotal, perhaps. Statistically insignificant.
Until they weren’t.
At sixteen, he did not wander like he had as a child.
He walked home from sixth form along the same route every day: down the high street, past the off-licence, across the small park with its perpetually broken swing. Headphones in, though often no music played. He preferred to hear what was coming.
It was early evening when it happened. Not late enough to be suspicious. Not early enough to be comfortably innocent.
A police car rolled slowly along the curb beside him.
Jon felt it before he consciously registered it—the subtle tightening at the base of his spine. He kept his pace measured. Not too fast. Not too slow. Hands visible. Shoulders relaxed. He had seen enough news segments, read enough articles, to know the choreography.
The car stopped ahead of him.
Two officers stepped out.
“Oi. You. Can we have a word?”
The phrase was deceptively casual.
“Yes, officer?”
Polite. Neutral. Unimpeachable.
They asked where he was going. Home. Where was home? He gestured down the road. Did he have ID? He produced his student card with steady fingers.
“You live around here?”
“Yes.”
“With your parents?”
“My grandmother.”
There was a pause at that. A glance exchanged.
“What’s your name?”
He told them.
“You been in any trouble before?”
“No.”
They asked if he’d seen anyone suspicious in the area. If he was carrying anything he shouldn’t be. If he’d mind if they had a quick look in his bag. He had done nothing. He knew this with mathematical certainty. His bag contained textbooks, annotated to within an inch of their lives. A half-finished essay. A battered copy of Orwell. The irony did not escape him.
And yet his pulse hammered as though he were guilty of something unnamed.
“Do I have a choice?” he asked, careful to keep his tone level.
One officer’s mouth twitched. “We’re just doing our job.”
Of course they were.
He handed over the bag.
They rifled through it with gloved hands, flipping through pages dense with his neat handwriting. One of them raised an eyebrow at the sight of Foucault’s name scrawled in the margins.
“Bit heavy, isn’t it?”
“I enjoy it,” Jon replied.
The bag was returned. Zipped, but not quite the way he had zipped it.
“All right,” the officer said at last. “On your way. And keep out of trouble, yeah?”
The implication hung there, absurd and enormous.
Jon nodded. “Of course.”
He walked away at the same measured pace. Did not look back. Did not run. Only when he turned the corner did he realise his hands were shaking.
At home, his grandmother was at the stove.
“You’re late,” she said, without turning.
“I was stopped,” he replied, setting his bag down very carefully. “By the police.”
The spoon stilled.
“For what?”
“They didn’t specify.”
Silence expanded in the kitchen, thick as steam. When she did turn, her expression was not surprised.
“Did you give them any trouble?” she asked.
“No.”
“Good. Don’t give anyone trouble, you hear me?”
He went upstairs and stood before the mirror again.
Sixteen now. Taller. Shoulders no broader. Hair cropped close. Accent neutralised. Posture impeccable.
He had done everything correctly.
And still.
The self he had constructed—carefully whitened at the edges, sanded down to something less conspicuous—had not rendered him invisible. It had only made him quieter.
He thought, unexpectedly, of the curls in the sink years ago. Of how fiercely they had resisted the scissors. Of how they had sprung back when released.
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By the time Jon arrived at university, he had refined himself into something almost immaculate.
His hair was cropped close again—neither rebellious nor particularly fashionable. Sensible. His clothes were deliberately nondescript: dark jumpers, clean lines, nothing that might invite comment. His accent had settled into that careful, flattened register that belonged nowhere specific and everywhere acceptable. It was an accent engineered to pass through rooms without friction.
He told himself that this was freedom.
No one here knew him as the brown boy with the white grandmother. No one had watched him be delivered home by policemen or heard the older boys’ laughter ricochet off tiled corridors. At university, he was simply Jonathan Sims: scholarship student, top marks, intimidatingly well-read. And intimidatingly boring.
It suited him.
The first time Georgie Barker saw him, she mistook him for the literature lecturer.
It was the first week of term, that peculiar academic limbo where everyone pretended confidence and carried too many books. Jon had arrived nearly twenty minutes early, as was his habit, and selected the seat at the head of the seminar table—not out of ambition, but geometry. From there he could see the door, the windows, the clock.
He disliked not seeing exits.
His notebook lay open before him, pen aligned neatly along the margin. He had already tabbed the week’s readings in three colours, cross-referenced arguments, and drafted two possible discussion points in case the room fell silent. He wore a charcoal jumper, sleeves pushed precisely to the wrist, and an expression that suggested he had strong, possibly fatalistic Opinions™ about historiography.
The door banged open.
A girl swept in, windblown and unapologetic, a canvas tote sagging from her shoulder as though it had survived a minor war. Her hair—bright, startling red—spilled around her face in a riot of curls that caught the fluorescent light like embers. It was not dyed; that much was immediately obvious. The colour was too complex, too alive, a copper flare against deep brown skin.
Except her skin was not uniform.
Jon noticed that before he could stop himself.
Pale constellations mapped across her hands and along the curve of her jaw, blooming in irregular shapes against the darker tone beneath. Vitiligo. He recognised it clinically, the way he recognised most things: filed and labelled before feeling could intrude.
She stopped short when she saw him seated at the head of the table.
“Oh—sorry,” she said, blinking. “I didn’t realise you were already here. I’ve got the reading, I promise, I just—”
Jon looked up, faintly alarmed. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re not Professor Hargreaves?”
He stared at her.
She stared back.
Her eyes were wide and unguarded, a warm brown flecked with something lighter near the pupils. There was no mockery in them. No challenge. Just genuine confusion.
Several responses arranged themselves in Jon’s mind like chess pieces.
“No,” he said at last, very precisely. “I am not.”
Her eyes widened further, then crinkled at the corners.
“Oh. Oh God. I am so sorry. That’s—wow. That’s embarrassing.”
“It is,” Jon agreed.
For half a heartbeat, he expected her to shrink. To flush. To retreat to a distant seat and avoid him for the remainder of term.
Instead, she laughed.
It was not a polite titter or a sharp, defensive snort. It was a warm, unselfconscious sound that filled the small seminar room and made the fluorescent lights seem less accusatory. It rolled out of her easily, as though she had long ago decided embarrassment was survivable.
“Well,” she said, dropping into the seat beside him without invitation, her tote thudding against the table leg, “in my defence, you do look like you’re about to assign me a six-thousand-word essay.”
“I would never be so irresponsible as to assign only six thousand words,” Jon replied automatically.
Her grin widened, slow and delighted, as though he had just performed a particularly clever sleight of hand.
He found himself noticing details against his will.
The pale patches along her knuckles where the skin lightened in uneven arcs. The way the vitiligo traced up her wrist like spilled milk, disappearing beneath a stack of woven bracelets. The contrast between the vivid red of her hair and the shifting mosaic of her skin. She was, in every possible sense, visibly different.
And she wore it as though it were entirely unremarkable.
No apology. No self-consciousness. No attempt at softening the edges.
Jon realised, with a flicker of something he could not quite name, that he was looking at someone who had not sanded herself down for the comfort of others.
She caught him glancing at her hands.
Instead of bristling, she held one up between them and wiggled her fingers.
“Cool, right?” she said cheerfully. “Limited edition skin.”
He had no prepared response for that.
“Right,” he managed.
She tilted her head, studying him now with open curiosity. “You look like you’re studying me.”
“I am not studying you,” he said, a touch too quickly.
“Mm,” she hummed, unconvinced. “Well, if you are, at least spell my name correctly when you write me down in those notes. It’s Georgie. With an ‘I-E.’”
The lecturer arrived moments later, flustered and shuffling papers, very clearly not the imposing academic she had mistaken Jon for. Georgie shot him a conspiratorial glance that said, See? You could’ve pulled it off.
Jon found, to his surprise, that he did not mind the mistake anymore.
That was how it began.
Georgie was not careful in the way Jon was careful. She spoke before fully arranging her thoughts. She wore bright jumpers and mismatched earrings and once brought an entire thermos of tea to a lecture “in case it got emotionally taxing.” And then offered him some!
Jon found her baffling.
He also found himself waiting for her.
They began studying together out of convenience. She struggled with theoretical frameworks; he struggled with saying anything in a group discussion that had not been rehearsed internally three times. She would nudge him under the table when he went too quiet. He would slide annotated articles across to her with neat arrows and explanatory footnotes.
“You don’t have to prove you belong here, you know,” she said to him once, sprawled across the library floor between stacks of books. “No one really belongs at Oxford.”
He bristled. “I assure you—”
“Jon.”
He looked at her then.
She was watching him not with curiosity, not with suspicion, but with something else. Something steadier.
“You don’t have to be the cleverest person in the room every second,” she said. “You already are. It’s exhausting to watch.”
The statement should have felt like praise.
With Georgie, he noticed, he did not monitor his vowels quite so obsessively. He did not measure each sentence for maximum neutrality. She teased him about his diction, mimicked his overly formal apologies, but there was no edge to it. No hierarchy being established. Only affection.
One dinner, Georgie asked questions. About Jon as a child. About his father. About the photograph in his dorm with the beach and the wind-tangled hair.
“Your mum?” she asked gently.
Jon tensed, waiting for the familiar tilt of the conversation into discomfort.
“Yes,” he said.
“She looks gorgeous,” Georgie said simply.
Not exotic. Not foreign. Not tragic.
Gorgeous.
Something in his chest shifted.
Later, walking her back to her flat, Georgie slipped her hand into his without ceremony.
He froze for half a heartbeat.
Then he let his fingers curl around hers.
It was such a small thing, objectively. Hands linked in the cool London evening. Students passing by without particular interest.
And yet it felt revolutionary.
He had spent years editing himself—trimming away softness, flattening difference, sharpening intellect into shield and sword. With Georgie, he found himself unexpectedly unedited. He told her about the police stop. About cutting his hair in the bathroom at eight. About the way strangers still asked where he was “really” from.
She listened. Not analytically. Not with the distant curiosity of someone collecting data. She listened as though each detail mattered because it was his.
“You know,” she said once, tracing idle patterns over his knuckles, “you really don’t have to act like you’re something you’re not, you know?”
Jon opened his mouth to refute this.
Closed it again.
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By 2011, Jon had acquired a new uniform.
Not in fabric—though there were more waistcoats now, more muted ties—but in posture. In expression. University had sharpened him; heartbreak had steadied him; Georgie had softened him in ways he did not fully understand until much later. They had ended abruptly and kindly, if such a thing could be said of endings. She had wanted something bigger. He had wanted something contained. Neither had been wrong.
The Magnus Institute suited containment.
The building itself seemed designed to discourage unnecessary warmth. Narrow corridors. Dust-heavy air. Windows that admitted light reluctantly, as if under protest. The sort of place where footsteps echoed even when one walked carefully. That was when he met Sasha James.
She was leaning against the reception desk, arms folded, engaged in what appeared to be a deeply unserious argument with a filing cabinet.
“I’m telling you,” she was saying, tapping the drawer with one nail, “if you eat one more statement I give you, I’m reporting you to HR. And you know how much they love getting rid of dusty old filing cabinets.”
Jon paused.
The filing cabinet did not respond.
Sasha turned at the shift in air and took him in at a glance.
She was a few shades lighter than he was, her skin warm olive under the fluorescent lights. Her hair was enormous—gloriously, defiantly poofy, a dark halo that refused to be compressed into corporate acceptability. It framed her face in soft, expansive curls that made no attempt at subtlety. There was something architectural about it. Intentional.
Everyone in the lobby seemed to know her. A passing researcher waved without breaking stride. Someone from Records called, “Sasha, have you found that log?” and she replied, “Define found,” without looking.
She assessed Jon with open interest.
“You must be the new one,” she said. “Elias said you’d be with me.”
He straightened instinctively. “Jonathan Sims. Research position.”
“Mm.” She pushed off the desk and extended a hand. “Sasha James. Also in research, but you can also call me the professional wrangler of nonsense.”
Her grip was firm. Warm.
“You’ve just come from Elias, haven’t you?” she added.
“Yes.”
“And?”
Jon hesitated. “He said I would be meeting you and a few other researchers.”
Sasha’s mouth curved faintly. “That’s one word for it.”
There was a quality to her expression that suggested she knew far more than she would ever articulate. Not secretive, precisely. Guarded.
Everyone knew Sasha, Jon would later realise. They know her laugh, her efficiency, the way she can locate a statement misfiled in 1993 within six minutes. They know she fixes the temperamental printer by threatening it under her breath.
But no one really knew her.
Jon did not know that yet. What he knew was that she was watching him the way Georgie once had—curious, not suspicious.
“You look terrified,” she observed lightly.
“I am not terrified.”
“Right. You’re just aggressively composing yourself in case something blows up.”
He bristled. “I assure you, I am perfectly capable of—”
“Relaxing?” she supplied.
He did not answer.
Sasha tilted her head, considering him. “Let me guess. You graduated top of your class. Colour-coded notes. Thinks the world can be solved if you just organise it correctly.”
Jon blinked. “That is an oversimplification.”
She grinned. “Knew it.”
There was no malice in it. Only recognition.
She gestured down the corridor. “Come on. I’ll show you where they keep the good tea. If you’re going to work here, you’ll need allies.”
“I am not here to make allies,” Jon said automatically.
Sasha laughed, a low, knowing sound. “Oh, Jon, no one survives this place alone.”
The word sweetheart startled him. Not because it was patronising—somehow, it wasn’t—but because it was casual. Intimate in the way older sisters might be.
As they walked, staff members greeted her by name. She greeted them back with easy familiarity. A hand on a shoulder. A teasing remark. A reminder about deadlines delivered with a smile that took the sting out of it.
“You’ve been here a while,” Jon observed.
“Six years,” she said. “Long enough to know which floorboards creak and which doors stick. Long enough to know when Elias is in one of his moods.”
“And when is that?”
She shot him a look. “You’ll see.”
They reached the break room, which was marginally less oppressive than the rest of the building. Sasha busied herself with the kettle.
“So,” she said over the rising hiss of steam, “what’s your damage?”
Jon stiffened. “I beg your pardon?”
She waved a hand. “Everyone who ends up here has something that led them here. Academic obsession. Morbid curiosity. Unresolved existential dread. Take your pick.”
“I am here because the research aligns with my interests,” he said.
“Which are?”
“Documentation. Patterns. Historical anomalies.”
“Mm.” She poured hot water into two chipped mugs. “And not, say, the desperate need to prove yourself indispensable?”
The accuracy of it irritated him.
“You are making a lot of assumptions, aren’t you?” he said coolly.
“I am,” she agreed. “And I’m usually right.”
She handed him a mug.
For a moment, they stood in silence.
Up close, Jon noticed the faint scar near her eyebrow. The careful way she held herself—open, but never fully unguarded. Her poofy hair cast soft shadows along her temples, framing a face that was expressive but measured.
“You don’t have to be so tense,” she said quietly, without looking at him. “No one here’s watching you.”
He almost laughed at that.
“You don’t know that,” he replied.
That earned him a real smile.
“Fair enough.” She leaned back against the counter. “Listen. You don’t have to be everyone’s friend. God knows I’m not. But you should at least try to have one. It makes the weird bits easier.”
“I don’t struggle with socialisation,” Jon said.
“Jon.”
The way she said his name—shortened already, as though she had decided on familiarity—was gentle, but firm.
“You walk like you’re bracing for impact.”
He opened his mouth to argue.
Closed it again.
Sasha softened. “Look. I know what it’s like. Being the only one in the room who looks like you. Being clever enough that people expect you to be difficult. Being… a bit much.”
Jon met her eyes.
For the first time since stepping into the Institute, he felt something uncoil slightly.
“You don’t seem particularly concerned,” he said.
She shrugged, one shoulder lifting. “Took me a while. But I decided I’d rather be too much than not enough.”
The statement hung between them.
Sasha blew gently on her tea. “Anyway. You’re stuck with me now. Might as well make the best of it.”
He nodded, once.
As first days went, it was not disastrous.
And as Sasha launched into a rapid explanation of the Institute’s filing system—complete with dire warnings about misplacing statements from before the 70s—Jon realised, with reluctant clarity, that she had already decided to take him under her wing.
He was not sure whether to be grateful.
He suspected he would be.
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Sasha didn’t waste time introducing him to a great many people in the office. After the tea, she decided Jon needed more… orientation. Orientation in the Magnus Institute was rarely official; it usually involved meeting someone who could both terrify and amuse him simultaneously.
“Come on,” she said, looping an arm through his as though he were a reluctant child. “You need a proper introduction. Everyone has a role. Tim’s also a researcher. Sweet guy. You’ll like him. Eventually.”
Jon followed, careful not to jostle the poofy halo of Sasha’s hair. He noted how the corridor lights flickered over her curls, highlighting copper sparks in the brown mass.
They found Tim hunched over a desk that appeared to be losing a slow, dignified battle against paper. Statements were stacked in precarious towers; folders lay open like exhausted mouths. Tim himself was bent over a yellowing transcript, brow furrowed, muttering under his breath as though negotiating with it.
“—no, that’s not even internally consistent, you can’t just—”
He looked up at the sound of Sasha’s approach.
And smiled.
It was a soft, unassuming smile. Open. Effortless. The sort of smile that suggested he had never in his life harboured a malicious thought.
Jon distrusted it immediately.
“Ah,” Tim said, straightening in his chair. His voice was warm, smooth in his vowels. “You must be the new recruit.”
“Tim Stoker,” Sasha supplied, breezing past him and perching on the edge of the desk with proprietary ease. “Meet Jonathan Sims. He’s the new guy Elias told us about.”
Tim stood and extended a hand. His grip was firm but not competitive.
“Welcome to the Institute,” he said. “Can I get you anything? Coffee, tea, biscuits? We’re very serious about biscuits here.”
“Tea would be ideal,” Jon said cautiously, still measuring the inflection of his voice. Not too clipped. Not too eager. Neutral.
Tim’s smile widened, just a fraction. “Of course. Strong?”
“Strong,” Jon replied.
“Excellent. I don’t trust people who say ‘whatever’s fine.’”
He moved with easy efficiency toward the small electric kettle in the corner, navigating around teetering stacks of files without disturbing a single one. There was something fluid about him—an ease in his shoulders, a looseness in the way he occupied space. Jon found himself relaxing despite his better judgment.
Tim looked utterly harmless.
Sasha leaned closer, her voice dropping conspiratorially.
“Sweet, right?” she murmured. “But don’t let that fool you.”
Jon frowned. “What do you mean?”
Sasha’s lips curved into a knowing smirk. “Tim’s just like a cat. Quiet. Friendly. Harmless. For about… oh, two weeks. Then he’s looking for something to make fun of you over. Watch.”
Jon glanced back at Tim, who was carefully spooning loose-leaf tea into a chipped mug as though performing a sacred rite.
“I doubt that,” Jon said.
Sasha only hummed.
Tim returned, setting the mug down with deliberate care. “There we are. No milk yet. I didn’t want to assume.”
“I take it black,” Jon replied.
Tim’s eyes flicked up, amused. “Of course you do.”
Jon stiffened slightly.
There was a beat of silence—pleasant, almost—before Tim leaned back against his desk and folded his arms.
“So, Jonny—”
Jon bristled at once. The reaction was immediate, visceral.
“Do not call me Jonny.”
Tim blinked, then smiled slowly, like someone who had just discovered a loose thread.
“Oh,” he said lightly. “Touchy. Got it.”
Sasha made a small, triumphant sound in her throat.
“I heard through the grapevine you went to Oxford,” Tim continued, entirely unbothered. “Very impressive. Must’ve been all tweed and existential crises.”
“It was academically rigorous,” Jon said coolly. “And I would prefer Jonathan.”
Tim tilted his head, considering.
“Jonathan,” he repeated, as though testing the weight of it. “Bit formal, isn’t it?”
“It is my name.”
“Fair enough.” Tim took a sip of his own tea, eyes glinting faintly over the rim of the mug. “So, Jonathan, tell me. Do you colour-code your shopping lists too, or just your research?”
Sasha laughed outright.
Jon felt heat creep up his neck. “My organisational systems are highly efficient.”
“Mm,” Tim said thoughtfully. “That’s a yes.”
Jon opened his mouth to retort and then, abruptly, understood.
This was it.
“Like I said, give him two weeks,” Sasha sing-songed under her breath.
Tim shot her a look. “What are you telling him?”
“Nothing,” she said innocently. “Just that you’re very predictable.”
“Rude.”
Jon took a careful sip of his tea to conceal the faintest hint of a smile.
Six years, Sasha had said.
They had history here.
And now, apparently, so did he.
Tim pushed off the desk. “Well, Jon, welcome to the madhouse. If you need help navigating the library, or avoiding Elias when he’s in a mood, I’m your man.”
“He’s always in a mood,” Sasha muttered.
Tim ignored her. “We’re very friendly here. Eventually.”
Jon met his gaze.
“Eventually,” he echoed.
And for the first time since stepping into the Institute, the tightness in his shoulders eased—not entirely, but enough.
If Tim was looking for something to make fun of, Jon suspected he would find it.
He just wasn’t prepared for how much he might not mind.
───────── 𓁺 ─────────
Over the next few days, as Jon was handed keys, access codes, and an alarming number of unlabelled filing drawers, he began to notice something else.
It was subtle at first. A pattern in passing faces.
The Magnus Institute was not, as he had unconsciously expected, a sea of tweed and pallor. There were white researchers, certainly—pale archivists with ink-stained cuffs and nervous dispositions—but woven among them were accents, skin tones, and features that did not fit neatly into the narrow image Jon had built in his mind of an old London academic institution.
A Nigerian woman in Artefact Storage who wore immaculate head-wraps in jewel tones and spoke with precise, Queen’s English consonants sharper than his own.
A South Asian man in the library who switched fluidly between Gujarati on the phone and Latin citations without missing a beat.
A Caribbean receptionist who hummed under her breath and knew everyone’s tea order.
Tim, of course. Sasha.
Even in passing, Jon caught fragments of languages in the corridors. Arabic, Mandarin, something Slavic he couldn’t immediately place. Stories folded into everyday conversation like origami—references to grandparents who had crossed oceans, to childhoods split between countries, to names that had been shortened or re-spelled for administrative convenience.
It unsettled him.
Not unpleasantly.
Just… unexpectedly.
He had grown used to being the only one in the room. The lone deviation in lecture halls. The brown punctuation mark in otherwise pale paragraphs. Even at Oxford, diversity had felt like a statistic rather than a lived reality.
Here, it felt structural.
On his fourth day, after witnessing what could only be described as an academically rigorous argument about the superiority of one brand of plantain chips over another, Jon found himself re-evaluating several assumptions.
He stood at the edge of the break room, mug in hand, listening to a Nigerian archivist and a Trinidadian researcher dismantle each other’s snack preferences with affectionate brutality.
Something about it felt… unfamiliar.
Later, in the library, as Sasha flipped methodically through a stack of reports from 1987, Jon cleared his throat.
“I’ve noticed something,” he said.
“Only one thing?” she replied without looking up. “Oh, you’re beginning to slip.”
He ignored that. “There are… a significant number of people who are…”
He faltered.
Sasha’s page-turning slowed. “Who are what, Jon?”
He disliked the trap in the question.
“Not white,” he finished crisply.
Sasha looked up at that.
“In the world?” she asked mildly. “Jon, I know you were raised in England, but honestly—”
“I meant in the Institute,” he corrected, a touch more sharply than intended.
Her gaze sharpened, amusement flickering there.
“Yes,” she said. “There are.”
“I wouldn’t have expected that.”
“Why not?” Sasha tilted her head, curls shifting like a dark cloud adjusting its shape.
Jon searched for language that wouldn’t sound accusatory or naïve. “Institutions of this age tend to reflect certain… demographic patterns.”
“Old, white, male?” she supplied.
“Historically speaking.”
Sasha leaned back in her chair, studying him as though he were a particularly interesting specimen.
“And you assumed this place would be the same.”
“It would have been statistically probable.”
She snorted. “You really do talk like that all the time.”
He pressed on. “Oxford was not particularly diverse within my department. Nor were most of the academic environments I’ve occupied.”
“Occupied,” she repeated dryly. “Like you were stationed there.”
Jon ignored that as well.
“I was simply surprised,” he said. “It appears disproportionate.”
“Disproportionate to what?”
“To the norm.”
Sasha’s expression shifted—less teasing now, more deliberate.
“Maybe this isn’t the norm,” she said.
He considered that.
Around them, the library hummed faintly. Down the corridor, someone laughed—Tim, probably. A phone rang, was answered in clipped, efficient tones that slipped briefly into Arabic before returning to English.
Sasha tapped the edge of the file against the desk to square it.
“You know what this place runs on?” she asked.
“Funding,” Jon said automatically.
“Stories.”
He hesitated.
“This place attracts people with stories,” she continued. “And not the tidy kind. Not the ones that fit neatly into a Sunday supplement profile.”
Jon’s grip tightened slightly on his mug.
“And often,” she said, voice softer now, “there are interesting stories when your parents, or your grandparents, or you are an immigrant.”
The word sat between them.
Jon felt it land somewhere under his ribs.
“Immigrant,” he repeated.
“Yeah.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Or the child of one. Or the grandchild. You grow up hearing things that don’t make it into textbooks. You grow up translating for your parents at GP appointments. You grow up knowing that official records don’t always tell the whole truth.”
Her eyes flicked meaningfully to the rows of books lining the walls.
“That does something to you,” she said. “You get comfortable with contradictions. With the idea that there’s always another layer. Another version.”
“And you think that’s why there are so many…?” He trailed off.
“So many of us?” Sasha finished.
He inclined his head.
“I think,” she said carefully, “that when you’ve already had to navigate being the only one in the room, or being looked at like a question mark, the idea that the world might be stranger than it pretends isn’t that far-fetched. You don’t get a real face here. You get to become something more. A name, sure. But it doesn’t matter what you look like in the end. You’re a story the same as any of these.”
Jon let that settle
Here, in these narrow corridors, he was not the only deviation.
He was one of many.
“I hadn’t considered that,” he admitted quietly.
Sasha’s mouth curved faintly. “You didn’t have to. That’s kind of the point.”
She picked up another statement, scanning it with practised efficiency.
“For what it’s worth,” she added, almost as an afterthought, “it’s easier to work somewhere that doesn’t make you feel like a diversity statistic.”
“You think that’s why I’m here?” he asked.
Sasha’s gaze sharpened. “Why do you think you’re here?”
“Academic interest.”
She gave him a look.
“Fine,” he amended. “Professional opportunity.”
“Jon.”
He exhaled.
“I’ve always been… interested in anomalies,” he admitted.
“Mm.” Sasha’s smile was knowing but not unkind. “Because you’ve been one.”
The words landed without malice.
He did not immediately argue.
Sasha gestured toward the corridor, where Tim’s laugh carried faintly from another room. “Most of us have, in one way or another. You grow up being told you’re different enough times, you start to wonder what else the world is hiding.”
Jon glanced around the library. The dust. The humming fluorescent lights. The endless rows of statements from people who had glimpsed something impossible and needed someone to believe them.
“And Elias?” he asked.
Sasha’s expression shuttered, just slightly.
“Elias likes people he can always learn more about,” she said, simply.
That, at least, made sense.
Jon looked again at the staff moving through the corridors—brown hands carrying ancient files, accented voices debating supernatural taxonomy, laughter in languages that had crossed oceans.
For the first time in an institution like this, he did not feel like the lone anomaly in a field of sameness.
He felt… expected.
The thought was not entirely comforting.
But it was something.