Chapter Text
Jonathan Sims floated in the in-between-space of consciousness for a while before he realized he was awake. It wasn’t a pleasant realization; his head was slow and swimming, he was nauseous, and his body felt a thousand pounds heavier than normal. He was lying down in what felt like a bed, but he didn’t remember going to sleep. Jon tried to open his eyes. He was unsuccessful, but the attempt did alert him to the fact that his face ached in a way he’d never felt before. And—there was something there, over his eyes. He blearily tried to reach up to touch it, fighting through the heaviness, but he was immediately impeded by something wrapped around his wrists, keeping his arms down at his sides and allowing only a few inches of movement.
It was at this point that disorientation began to turn to fear.
Jon yanked ineffectually at the restraints (some kind of pliable plastic) around his wrists. When that didn’t work, he felt along them, fingers trembling, back to the source—metal bars, parallel to his body. Was this a hospital bed? Jon turned his face and rubbed it into his pillow, trying to dislodge whatever was obstructing his vision. It hurt, and he couldn’t stop the whimpers that escaped him, but he kept going, he needed to see .
“Stop that,” a voice scolded, and Jon’s whimper turned into a startled yelp.
“Wha- who’s there?” Jon demanded (or tried to demand, his tongue felt a bit too thick to really get the force he wanted), fruitlessly looking towards the source of the voice, ears straining. He didn’t need to; whoever was in the room with him made no effort to be quiet, and he clearly heard the sound of boots on concrete approach before stopping maybe five feet away.
“I won’t tell you my name,” the voice answered matter-of-factly. “But you can call me… Grace, if you need to call me anything.” It was a woman’s voice, low and soft, with an edge of something to it that made Jon’s hair stand on end. Not that her answer did anything to help with that.
“Where am I?” Jon tried instead.
“A basement in Slough.” What?
Jon desperately fought through the fog in his brain, trying to remember anything that would tell him how he got here. After a long moment, he could just barely remember walking home from the Institute. Jon had been spending more and more time there as of late, but this particular evening Martin had bullied him into going home before he could end up sleeping on the break room couch a second night in a row. Jon had been close to his flat, the sun hadn’t even quite set yet, and then… a horrible feeling of being followed, someone grabbing his arm, a harsh smell, then nothing.
“You—you took me,” Jon said, finally, voice shaking. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah,” came the simple reply, and dread solidified in his belly.
“Why?”
“Because you’re the Archivist.” Jon opened his mouth to ask what the hell that had to do with anything, but she cut him off. “Look, here’s how this is going to go. You can keep asking me questions if you like; I can’t answer most of them, but I’ll try. Then, I’m going to give you a message I need you to deliver for me. When I know you understand, I’ll call you an ambulance, and if all goes well, you’ll never hear from me again.”
“You’ll let me go?” he asked, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice.
“Yes, I promise.”
Internally, he warred against the hope that this would be over soon if he just did what this ‘Grace’ asked and the suspicion that this was some mind game she was playing with him. Why go to all the trouble of kidnapping someone just to send a message?
“Are you with the mob?” he blurted out before he could think better of it. He immediately regretted the question, even as it startled a laugh out of his captor, a quiet, huffing thing.
“No, not the mob.” He thought he could hear the edge of a smile in her voice, and he felt indignation rise up within him.
“W-well what else am I supposed to—fine, what- what does me being an archivist have to do with you kidnapping me?”
“… The problem with that question is how much to tell you without just making your life worse.” Jon couldn’t help the scoff that escaped him at that. “I’m serious, Jon,” and oh, she knew his name, and he did not like how familiar she sounded, chiding like she knew him and had any right to comment on his behavior. He bit his tongue on the angry, frightened response that wanted to bubble out of him, and after a moment she sighed.
“I suppose the short answer is that I’m trying to destroy the Magnus Institute, specifically the Archives, and the Archivist complicates matters.”
“You- you’re trying to- you- what? Why? ” Jon spluttered, completely caught off guard by this answer. She said it like it was so obvious; was he just missing something in his addled state?
“Jon, you know there’s something wrong with the Institute, you’re not an idiot. It’s not your fault, but by becoming the Archivist, you’re tangled up in it. If I’m going to deal with that place, I need you out of the way.” Jon’s heartrate skyrocketed as he latched onto that last bit.
“You said you would let me go!”
“I said I would and I will. There’s more than one way to get someone out of the way.”
“F-fine, but nothing you’ve said explains why you had to do this,” he tugged at the restraints, rattling the bars, “—just because I’m the Archivist.”
A sigh that sounded far too put upon for someone who wasn't currently strapped to a bed.
“You know there’s things out there, real things, like Leitners and Prentiss. The Archivist has a place in all that, but I’m not going to tell you cause you don’t need to know; you’re not the Archivist anymore.”
The mention of Prentiss sent his mind racing; he didn’t expect the supernatural to be a component here, or for a stranger to know anything about that situation. He was quickly distracted from that, as the way she phrased that last sentence, even as it made little sense, made his blood run cold. Something about the way she said it made him think she didn’t just mean that he would do the sensible thing and quit his job after this experience.
“What do you mean ‘I’m not the Archivist anymore’?”
At that, there was only silence. His head throbbed.
“What did you do?” There was no answer for a long moment, then a long, tired exhalation.
“I made sure you couldn’t fill your role anymore.”
“You—”
“I blinded you.”
I blinded you.
There was a rushing noise in his ears, and all of a sudden Jon was sitting in the bed, doubled over with his head down between his knees, chest heaving. A hand was pressing firmly into his back and a voice in his ear saying, “That’s right, Jon, you’re alright, just breathe.”
It took Jon a moment to understand his new position. When he did, he lashed out with as much fury as he was capable of. It didn’t matter. Even if he hadn’t been drugged and disoriented, his captor was bigger than him, and he could feel solid muscle as he tried to push her away. He did at least manage a solid elbow across what he thought was her cheek—as well as what felt like a long scratch down her arm—before she had both of his wrists in her hands.
She maneuvered so her arms reached around him to cross his wrists across his chest, his back pressed to her front in a mockery of an embrace while a metal bar pressed into his side. He tried to throw his head back into hers; he succeeded in catching her chin and jarring his own aching head in a way that made him feel like he was about to vomit. With a pained groan, he slumped in her hold.
Through the whole struggle, ‘Grace’ had been silent for all but a few grunts. Pressed up against her, Jon became aware of a different noise; an incredibly low growling sound rumbling from her chest that he felt more than heard. And then there was the smell; it wasn’t exactly a bad smell, but it did not smell like human odor or sweat—it was animal, but wrong.
As little as it was to go on, in the moment Jon was filled with the bone-chilling certainty that this person was not human.
For about a minute, neither of them spoke, and Jon just listened to that slight growl, the blood rushing in his ears, and the whimpering and keening that he had started at some point and couldn’t seem to stop.
At the end of the minute, she stopped growling, loosened her grip, and started guiding him back down onto the bed.
“Wait, wait, please, don’t, please, no,” Jon babbled, suddenly infinitely more terrified at the idea of being restrained around this person than he already was. She had to let go of one of his wrists to let him down, and he immediately started trying to pry her fingers off of him.
“Calm down.” She batted his hand away and pinned his arm down. There was a sound of Velcro, and in a moment one arm was back in the restraint.
“ Please. ”
“If I leave it, you’ll try to run, and the old lady has too much shit down here for you to bump into,” she said dispassionately. He didn’t have time to parse that before she easily captured his other hand in her own.
“I don’t understand,” Jon whispered, plaintive.
“I know.” She actually sounded a bit sad about that, and Jon hated her for it. She redid the other strap, and he was back where he started. He flinched when he felt her hand on him again, this time on his cheek, but she was just brushing his hair away from where it caught on his lip. (It must have look such a mess, he thought vaguely. He’d been meaning to get it cut, but it hadn’t seemed all that important with everything going on.)
“I think that’s enough questions. Are you ready for the message?” After a long moment, he gave the smallest of nods. He didn’t really believe at this point that he was going to survive this encounter, but even the faint hope of leaving this place was enough to motivate. He heard a slight sound of movement and a creak of metal—he pictured her leaning in on the bed rail and leaned himself away a bit in turn.
“Right, this one is for your assistants. The message is: Leave the Archives and the Institute. Quit. Pack up your things, and never go back. If you don’t, I’ll do the same to you that I’ve done to the Archivist.”
Jon would have thought that there was some kind of threshold for panic, and that he should have hit it by now, but evidently not. He did not know what he expected her message to be, but somehow it didn’t occur to him that his assistants could be in danger too, that they could find themselves in the same position. Foolish of him.
“Don’t hurt them, don’t you dare.”
“They listen to those instructions and I won’t have to.”
Jon didn’t say anything, and after a moment she started rattling off addresses. He was briefly taken aback, until he recognized one; Martin’s flat. Jon remembered because he had helped Martin fill out an incident report with the ECDC. He blanched, and she continued speaking, as if following his thoughts—
“That’s where all your assistants live, yeah? Except Martin, he’s staying at the Institute since Prentiss came for him.”
“How do you know that? ”
--I see now why the hive hates you.
--He will want to see it when the Archivist’s crimson fate arrives.
“Are you working with Jane Prentiss?” he asked before she could answer the first question.
“What? No .”
“Oh.” Okay, she could be lying, but she did sound genuinely shocked and a little offended at the allegation.
“ Jane Prentiss, really? Why the hell would I be working with her?”
“Oh, yes, two horrifying monster women threatening me and my assistants, you have absolutely nothing in common,” he snapped against all better judgement. That one actually got him a full laugh.
“Heh, If it makes you feel any better, Prentiss is on my list too.”
“Immeasurably comforted, thank you.”
“So, you’ll tell them?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
A sound of slight movement, then hands were cupping his face. He tried to jerk away, but they proved to be immovable, and straining against her only succeeded in making his head hurt worse. He stopped, and she just held him there. Now that it wasn’t in the midst of struggle, he could feel the callouses on her hands and that her nails were slightly too long to be practical… or maybe those were claws. She spoke again, and Jon felt her breath on his face, like she was leaning in and trying to force eye-contact that was no longer possible.
“Now, this message is for you, and it is very important that you understand me, Jon. The message is: Let. This. Go. Don’t go looking into the Institute, and don’t go looking for me. There are no answers to be found here, at least none that will leave you any better off. The most you’ll manage by digging is drawing the attention of those much worse than me. Yes, there is worse than me. With these people you’ll be lucky if they only kill you. Do you understand?”
His breath was coming fast again, and he nodded as much as he was able, anything to get her out of his face. And just like that, the hands disappeared.
A few seconds later, he heard a tiny tap tap tap against glass, then the faint sound of a phone call ringing out. Jon’s heart was in his throat as the call was picked up and a tinny voice came through on the other end, asking what was the emergency.
“Hi, I need an ambulance…”
***
‘Grace’ gave the operator an address, then left the phone with Jon on speaker. (The sound of a door closing, then a few minutes later the sound of a car pulling out, seemed to indicate that she had left entirely.) The operator on the other end, Clara apparently, was probably surprised to learn that the woman she had just been speaking to was a violent criminal, but she did a good job not showing it. She just spoke calmly to Jon and went a long way toward helping him feel sane as the unreality of the situation set in.
The police that broke down the door could have done less shouting, but he supposed there was only so much he could expect. The EMTs that loaded him up were quick and efficient, and the neighbors that he could hear gathering in the street were grumpy, but in that way that actually meant they were excited to have something to gossip about.
Apparently, it was 3 in the morning. Not that Jon had any way of knowing.
Speaking to the doctor, Jon listened as she described his injuries. How the way in which he was injured meant there was a low chance of healing and a high chance of infection.
Mechanically, he gave her permission to remove what was left of his eyes.