Chapter Text
The rift between worlds seals so suddenly that when Jon tries to throw himself back through his shoulder slams against solid wall. A few cobwebs shake loose above him. “What the fuck ,” he shouts, terror and rage drowning out any other emotion. “Basira!”
“It’s over. We’re through to the other side,” she says firmly. Her face is coated in soot and ashes, and her eyes burn brightly in the dark basement. “There’s no going back, Jon.”
“We have to,” he demands, shaking. “Martin is— we have to go , have to get him and bring him—”
“He’s gone,” she says. Her voice isn’t unkind, it’s just… factual. A statement. “The place was crumbling around us, Jon, I could only grab one of you—”
“Why the fuck did you pick me then?” he says, whirling on her in a fury. “The world ended. You could’ve let me end with it, probably wanted to, why did you grab my arm instead of Martin’s? Why?”
“Jon—”
“ Why ?”
Even though he’s shouting, even though he’s so angry he can barely stop the tears from flowing, his voice seems somehow… flat. Empty.
Basira notices. “Can’t compel me anymore,” she points out. “Looks like your spooky powers belonged to the other universe.”
He doesn’t need them. He lunges at her in grief and anger. “You left him to die ,” he shouts, hands fisting in the material of her jacket. “Martin fucking Blackwood was the one worth saving, not me and you know it. Why ?”
“I don’t know!” she shouts back, their faces too close. “It was a split-second decision and I don’t know why it was you instead of him. To be honest, Jon, it was probably just because you were standing closer at the time. But it’s over, it’s in the past, and we’re here now. So… so if you’re going to kill me, go ahead and do it. And be left all alone in an unfamiliar universe.”
For a moment, they just stand there, wedged into each other’s personal space and feeling all the pain and fear and loss swarm around them like so many biting gnats. She lost Daisy days ago. Jon lost Martin minutes ago. Both losses are a universe away, in a dead world caved in on itself.
Finally, finally, Jon sighs and lets go. He steps away, feeling as his skeleton and soul adjust to this new and foreign universe.
Martin is gone. Dead.
Their world is dead.
“Jesus Christ,” Jon mumbles, staring down at the dusty basement floor of the house on Hilltop Road. “Jesus Christ.” Adrift in a world that is not his own, the Archivist sinks to his knees and weeps for his lost love.
Basira and Jon exist as refugees of a dead world, drifting through a foreign universe with no anchors but each other. And that’s when they can bear to sit in the same room together. Basira tends toward the pragmatic, going out and finding a job and finding an apartment.
Jon relishes his severance from the Eye as much as he grieves the loss. He still Knows too much, all the knowledge he’d accumulated back in his universe of origin. Without the Beholding to manage it, all that Knowledge crowds his skull. He can feel it pushing on the back of his eyeballs.
Basira brings up the Extinction one night, while they’re wedged together on the sofa with a bottle of whiskey. “I never researched it as much as Martin did,” she says, not meeting Jon’s eyes. “But… well, the human race we knew is dead, isn’t it? We’re all that’s left. That sounds more Extinction-y than anything else.”
“I suppose,” Jon says, staring into the bottle.
“Yeah.” Basira coughs. “We’re the only ones left. Our world is gone.”
“We’re… we’re our own archive now, aren’t we,” Jon muses. “All that’s left of the world we left behind.”
Jon storms into the flat they’ve been sharing and slams the door. “There’s one here,” he says, waving a flyer in front of him.
Basira glances up from the coffee table, where she’s been methodically taking apart her gun and putting it back together. “One what?”
“Another Magnus Institute.” Jon drops the flyer in front of her with a scowl. He sits beside her for a moment, but the restless energy in his legs drags him right back up again and sets him to pacing across the floor. “It’ll happen again, it’ll happen here. Whatever poor fool sitting in the role of Archivist will bring on the apocalypse, and we’ll have lived through the destruction of two worlds.”
“Jon,” Basira says, eyes skating over the flyer. “How closely have you looked at this?”
“Well,” he says, “I pretty much saw the logo and ran here. Looks like they’re asking for statements, right?”
“Yeah,” Basira says. “Look at the bottom.”
He does. “Fucking hell.”
“Yeah.”
In small font near the bottom of the page, the contact information for the staff of this universe’s Magnus Institute is listed beside their extensions.
The first line reads: Head of the Institute — Director Sims.
Jon spends about two days processing this new information about the strange parallel world. There’s another version of him, a version who ascended to Elias Bouchard’s role.
“So the other me,” Jon says, “he’ll end this world. He will. Same as me. Or else, or else… he’ll make someone else do it. Shit.”
“Might not even be you,” Basira reasons.
“What?”
“He’s the head of the Institute,” she says. “Back in our world, only ever one man got to hold that position.” She looks at him steadily and says, in a low voice, “Wonder what you look like with green eyes.”
“Right. That’s, that... ” He rakes his hands through his unruly hair. “Fine. I know what I need to do.”
“You what ?”
“The other me,” Jon says. “Maybe he’s just me or maybe, maybe he’s Jonah… it doesn’t matter. I have to kill him.”
“You’re… going to kill… yourself?”
“I mean,” Jon huffs. “There are two of me. That’s… it’s not right. And I know for certain I’m not going to set off the apocalypse. Again. I can’t say the same for him .”
“O… kay,” she says, watching him carefully. Jon can’t help but wonder if Daisy ever discussed her murder plans with Basira like this. No, he thinks, she’d preferred to turn a blind eye. Let everything sit in the dark. They can’t do that here. “You’re sure you can go through with it?”
“I’m…” He’s killed before. Other avatars. This version of him… well, he can’t have gotten to the top of the Magnus Institute without serving the Eye. Jon doesn’t know his path, can’t know that kind of thing here, but he’s pretty sure he won’t be killing anyone human.
And it’s not as if it’s the first time he’s contemplated his own demise.
“Yes,” he says finally. “I know I can do this.”
“You really think so.”
“I’m not asking your permission or your… your approval,” he says.
“Then what are you asking for?”
“... A gun.”
She doesn’t ask him whether he knows how to use it. She just hands it to him.
Jon doesn’t recognize the receptionist at the front desk of the Institute. Evidently, she doesn’t recognize him either because she just gives him her bland customer service smile. Not the way you’d look at your boss.
This other universe’s Jonathan Sims must look quite different. Maybe he wears his hair differently, or maybe he’s not riddled with the scars Jon has. Jon wonders if he’ll take the chance to get a good look at him before taking him out.
He honestly doesn’t know.
“I’m here to, um… statement,” he mumbles.
“Of course,” she says, nodding sympathetically. “Basement level. I’ll buzz you in.”
The layout of this Archives is nearly identical to the one Jon remembers. There’s an extra door here and there, which sets his nerves prickling as he considers parallel versions of the Distortion. He shakes off the old anxieties. He’s here on a mission.
Director Sims’ desk faces away from the glass window of his office, so the first look Jon gets is of the back of his head. He does wear his hair differently— shorter, with the ends curling over his ears. There’s a lot more gray in his hair than in Jon’s own, spreading thickly through from the roots rather than sprinkled in throughout.
There’s a part of Jon that’s worried that he won’t be able to go through with this if he doesn’t catch his other self off-guard. Not necessarily because he’s afraid the other Jonathan Sims will overtake him, but because he’s afraid he’ll seize up the moment this alternate version of himself begins to speak.
Or, of course, there’s the possibility that this is just Jonah Magnus wearing him like a suit. Jon doesn’t know how to deal with that other than shooting fast and going for the eyes.
He opens the door. When Director Sims glances up, Jon takes the shot and fires.
The other man doesn’t even shout, just lets out a quiet sort of gasp and slides to the floor, blood spreading rapidly from the wound in his chest. Jon missed the eyes, but that’s alright. He’s not out of bullets. He cocks the gun, aims and—
And Director Sims looks at him.
His eyes aren’t the sickly green of Jonah Magnus.
They aren’t Jon’s eyes, either.
They widen in confusion and surprise, looking him up and down. And for a moment, Jon has no idea who this stranger is. And then, like a newsreel erupting in his brain, he sees the photographs that lined his grandmother’s mantelpiece. He recalls blurry memories of warmth and safety, so many years before the Spider marked him.
His father says, “Jonny?” Jon just stares, barely noticing the gun shaking in his hand. “Jonny, h-how are you alive?”
Distantly, Jon is latching onto the information and filing it away, classifying it, adding it to his library of knowledge. In this universe, his father survived his accidental fall. In this universe, Jon is dead. In this universe, his father somehow ended up the head of the Magnus Institute.
In this universe, his father dies not from a fall but from a bullet fired by his own son.
“Hilltop Road,” Jon says, walking further into the room. He crouches beside his father, dropping the gun to his side. “The rift.”
“Of course,” his father sighs as if it were obvious. “You’re from the other side.”
“It’s gone,” he says, his voice hoarse. “The other universe. It’s… I destroyed it.”
“Good Lord,” his father says. The building creaks around them, joists settling and cracking like the hull of an old ship. “You’ve been busy.”
“I didn’t think—” Jon looks down at the gun he’s still clutching. “I didn’t know that you were… I thought you were me. I sh-shot you because I thought you were me.”
His father says only, “Ah.” His eyes drift shut, and it looks like it takes some effort for him to open them again. Dust drifts from the ceiling as the building shakes. “You were trying to stop me from going after the Watcher’s Crown then.”
“How do you know… ?”
His father laughs quietly. “I Know everything,” he says. “I Know too much. Truth be told, I’m a little relieved I’ll finally get to stop Knowing so much.”
“Dad…”
Jon can’t make himself understand, can’t bend and warp the sight in front of him into a shape that makes sense. He feels like he has to; his father is fading fast.
“I forgive you, son,” Jon’s father says as he starts to slide away. “There was… no other way our story could’ve ended.” He sucks in a rattling breath. The building seems to echo it, bits of plaster raining down from the ceiling and walls. “You probably already know, Jonny, but… when I die, the Institute falls with me.”
He’d been willfully ignoring that part, thinking only of saving the world. But it’s hard to ignore it as the building threatens to collapse around him.
“Best get going,” Jon’s father says, patting Jon on the arm.
Jon runs through the collapsing building as wooden beams and bits of masonry fall down around him. His father’s blood is on his hands, not to mention the employees all throughout the building. He marches on toward home.
And he nearly makes it out.
When Jon wakes up, he’s staring at a ceiling he doesn’t recognize. He turns his head to see a sliver of light peeking through old motheaten drapes, a bedside table shrouded by dust. The mattress beneath him is sunken in places. His chest hurts.
There’s a woman on the other side of the room.
She tells him she’s a doctor, and that she pulled him from the rubble of the Magnus Institute. She tells him that when she found him there was a spike of rebar speared through his heart, and she’d had to replace the damaged organ.
His chest hurts. He can feel something spooling inside, clicking out his heartbeats one after the other. It feels like—
She tells him the tape recorder had appeared beside his unconscious body. She tells him it had seemed more intent on keeping him alive than any other part of him, and so she’d installed it in place of his heart.
It’s only then that Jon realizes that, while the doctor has been telling him all of these things, her mouth hasn’t moved once.
“Oh good,” Jon says, drifting somewhere beyond caring, “they have vampires in this world, too.”
When Jon finally sees Basira again, she looks surprised to see him alive. “Whole building just sunk in on itself,” she says, her eyes flicking over him. “Figured that meant you were successful. And dead, too.”
Jon presses a hand against his chest, where he can feel the subtle rhythm of the tape recorder reeling away to keep him alive. “I’m beginning to think I can’t die,” he says.
“The other version of you did, though.”
Jon looks down at his hands. “It was my dad.”
“ What ?”
“The director of the Magnus Institute,” he explains flatly. “It wasn’t me. It was my father.”
Basira opens her mouth to say something, but at this point she realizes it would just be more noise. Jon killed the head of the Institute and the Institute fell, too. Jon killed his father, and Basira really doesn’t know what effect that’s going to have on Jon.
Or if any of it even matters at this point.
Jon doesn’t tell her about Dr. Carmilla.
Not for a long time.