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Simon Fairchild had seen a lot of things. Most of them made sense, when considering human motivations and their frankly predictable consequences. Few of them made sense, in the grand scheme of things.
After being alive so long, he was rarely surprised. Or, that’s to say he had so few expectations that surprise was somewhat foreign - he could take most any news in stride, and he laughed at everything.
He wasn’t called Simon yet, when that upstart Jonah Magnus made his new Institute. He wouldn’t be for a while. He wasn’t rich yet, either, though he certainly wasn’t poor. But Simon would be his favorite of the many personas he’d adopted in his five hundred years, and certainly the longest lasting.
Either way, he wasn’t surprised when he saw Jonah expertly negotiating for funding at a large soiree hosted by the Lukases, an event which all of high society attended and left feeling more alone than ever. Simon had long since allied with the Lonely and those who served it, though their bond was far from close and he had not yet become their equal in money as he had in influence. If he was rich, Simon thought absently, he’d fund Jonah’s Institute. It seemed like it could be fun, change the balance in a rather interesting way.
He wasn’t quite surprised when he saw Jonah later lingering near one of the walls with the youngest Lukas while couples danced on the main floor in elaborate formations without ever touching each other. A part of him found it funny, what people had to do to get by in the world.
If Simon had thought about that interaction at all, or the incident later in the night (hilarious for him, rather unfortunate for the somewhat compromised pair) in which he’d gone out to the deserted balcony for a glimpse of his beloved sky and found Jonah on his knees, he would have assumed that it had been a transaction. This assumption would have been confirmed when the Magnus Institute, as Jonah had rather self-centeredly decided to name it, received a generous and much-needed donation the following week.
He was not inclined to change this belief the next week, when Peter showed up to their monthly business meeting (read: poker game) twenty minutes late, giving the excuse “Just been to check on the Eye’s new stronghold, and I got caught in traffic. Must say, it looks to have been a fine investment.”
Simon had chuckled, and said “It’s been so long since the game has changed.” But he’d seen the way Peter’s shirt had been wrinkled, and it wasn’t quite thick enough to completely cover up the dark purple spot on his collarbone.
Peter had agreed, and that had been that.
Or it had been, until Simon had stopped by the Institute nearly a month later to make sure Jonah knew how utterly pointless his little endeavor was. Sure, he thought this base of the Eye would be fun, but it didn’t hurt to scare the competition a little.
Simon opened Jonah’s office door without knocking - he never had been one for much politeness - and found Jonah in a rather unfortunate position. Sitting on his desk, jacket discarded, shirt opened, and belt unbuckled. And completely alone.
“Getting much work done for your patron, Jonah?” Simon asked with a laugh.
Jonah scowled and buckled his belt, but made no other attempt to make himself presentable. “Can I help you?” He asked irritably.
“Possibly. I just thought I’d remind you of your Institute’s complete insignificance for a bit.” He snapped his fingers for no reason other than to be dramatic and sent Jonah into a tailspin of vertigo. “Isn’t it interesting, the infinite vastness of the universe? How trivial such a thing as an Institute might seem - there’s no way you could ever watch it all. In fact, I’m willing to bet you can’t even See how fast you’re falling.”
“I’m not… falling…” Jonah managed, though his face was starting to turn slightly green.
“Aren’t you? Or are you sinking into the unknowable depths of the ocean? Staring into the uncaring void of space?” He clapped his hands and smiled, releasing Jonah.
“Did you have a point?” Jonah was obviously shaken up, but did his best to hide it.
“Just that Seeing isn’t everything.” Simon shrugged and started to leave. “You can come out now, Peter,” he called. “I know you’re there.”
A frazzled but much more put together Peter stepped out of the fog in the corner of the room, glaring at him.
“I’ll see you for poker next week, yes?” Simon said.
Peter smiled tightly. “I’ll be there.”
Simon laughed to himself all the way out of the Institute. If it truly relied entirely on funding secured through this, how long would the Eye last? Barely the blink of a (human) eye. However long it took Peter to get bored, and Simon had known Peter, though not long by his standards, for several years. His interests were fleeting at best.
Perhaps it was due to Simon’s general remove from the world that he didn’t notice it sooner. After all, it had been so long that he’d cared about anyone (as the existence of everyone was largely pointless, here one moment, gone the next, desperately constructing meaning in the face of an uncaring universe). He didn’t care; he wasn’t sure he could anymore, or would want to. So sometimes he forgot that other people cared.
Of course, he knew that a large majority of the human populace went about their tiny little lives desperate for love, for any sort of connections they could hold up as proof of the value of their existence. He’d used that against them often enough. But he’d forgotten that other avatars, others who knew of the true nature of the universe, or knew more than everyone else, at least, though admittedly not much more, could care too.
So he wouldn’t say he was surprised when he was walking through a park at night, tilting his head back to look at the few stars he could see over London’s rapidly-growing light pollution, and saw Jonah and Peter. Their hands were linked together and they kissed softly in the moonlight. If Simon didn’t know better, he would have almost said they were courting.
Simon looked away and continued his walk down the path, refraining from the urge to whistle just to make sure they knew they’d been spotted. He was somewhat concerned by his tendency to see them together - either they were together nearly constantly, somewhat unlikely given Peter’s patron, or the Eye enjoyed being observed almost as much as it enjoyed observing. He didn’t like either of those options.
Sometime in the middle of the 1600s, Simon had gotten bored. He’d wanted to know what other people thought of when they thought of their God, and he’d taken it upon himself to learn. And to make sure that each of his fellow students dreamt of falling, saw the infinite bounds of the universe and the unexplored depths of the sea every time they stepped outside. But somehow, he’d been so bored he’d gotten ordained.
The Vast hadn’t cared. It didn’t have the capacity to care about such trivial things as what one of its devotees did with his spare time. So Simon learned the weak points in the Christian doctrine (and there were a lot of them, and even more when he could show proof of God’s absence, or at the very least abandonment of Earth, with a snap of his fingers), and he used them to reel in his victims.
It had been two hundred years since Simon had been ordained. He hadn’t thought about organized religion in nearly twelve decades. Until one day, Jonah found him in a cafe.
“Simon.” Jonah said, sitting down in the chair opposite him.
Simon took another bite of his sandwich.
“Being ordained allows you to legally perform marriage ceremonies.”
“That’s an interesting factoid the Eye gave you,” Simon hummed. “I’m uncertain why you’re telling me.”
Jonah looked him in the eye for too long to be comfortable before he started speaking. “Ordained as a member of the Anglican clergy, October 8, 1608. Ranked thirty-seventh in a class of forty.”
“You know, I’d forgotten about that,” Simon said cheerfully, and he wasn’t lying. “Was a bit stupid of me. A good time-waster, for sure, but dreadfully dull.”
“I need you to ordain my wedding.”
Simon laughed. “And why would you ask me?” It had been less than a year since he’d first seen Peter’s dick in Jonah’s mouth, and unfortunately, that first time had not been the last. This seemed like the sort of thing, in Simon’s opinion, that a bride would have an objection to. Not that he particularly cared what any bride of Jonah’s might think of her husband, or really, of anything.
“It seemed fitting,” Jonah said. “Also, you owe Peter a favor. I’m collecting.”
Simon raised his eyebrows. Was Jonah really so stupid as to think marrying a person devoted to loneliness was a good idea? “Are you usually this stupid, or is this a new development?”
“What?” Confusion flitted over Jonah’s face before being replaced with a practiced, businesslike mask.
“This is the worst plan I’ve ever heard.”
“Simon.”
And he thought, why not? Jonah had absolutely no place calling him Simon, they were far from on first name terms. And Jonah’s marriage could never be legal, regardless of whether Simon was ordained. Beyond that, it was just a terrible idea. But, what did it matter?
“You’re going to owe me a favor.”
“As I said, you owe Peter,” Jonah repeated in a voice that would have been chilling if Simon didn’t know exactly how young he was, how little power he could truly exert over him.
“This is a two-favor deal. But I’ll do it. Send me an invitation.”
“Thank you.”
Simon laughed as Jonah walked out of the cafe. He took another bite of his sandwich and shook his head. Kids these days.
Simon flatly refused to ordain their second wedding. It had been nearly fifty years, and both Jonah and Peter had aged, though not as much as they should have. They’d parted with such vitriol that the Beholding-Lonely alliance had nearly collapsed, and even from all the way in Italy where he was climbing mountains, Simon had felt the effects. So when ten years later Peter had asked him to marry him and Jonah again during their card game, he’d said no. It had been fun last time, but once was enough.
That hadn’t stopped Peter, though. The next month he’d come back with a new ring on his finger, bite marks on his neck, and the telltale glow of someone whose patron is feasting.