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He must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.
The tunnels are dark and narrow, branching off unexpectedly and at strange angles, and between one breath and the next he finds himself alone, with no trace of Tim or Martin anywhere.
No trace of anything living, in fact; he certainly can’t see any worms.
Not that that means they aren’t there.
He stops running and turns to squint back into the darkness. There is nothing there but empty tunnel. The fear sits sharp in his throat like a bladed thing, though he supposes that might also be from the running; he’s out of shape. If - when - if he survives this, he should probably take up … cardio? Running? Whatever it is people do when they work out.
If his knee isn’t permanently messed up, of course.
Fuck .
“Tim?” he calls quietly. “Martin?”
No-one answers. In the distance, there are faint sounds of water dripping. The tape recorder in his hand is still running, and the whirr of it is soothing, even if nothing else about the situation is. If he dies here, if – well, they’ll be able to hear it. They’ll know what happened.
He won’t be a mystery.
On impulse, he lifts the recorder to his mouth.
“I’m lost,” he murmurs into it, and then keeps narrating in a quiet, mindless stream as he wanders, half stumbling, every step sending pain stabbing up his injured leg. It’s stupid to wander here, but he can’t stay still. The worms might reappear.
Or worse.
So he walks, and keeps walking. Every sound he makes echoes unsettlingly down the tunnel he’s in. The stone walls give everything a ghostly, wet quality that makes his spine curl. He attempts to forcibly steer his thoughts away from the word “spooky”, but it’s –
The whole bloody place is spooky. And hard to navigate too, at that – like Danielewski’s house of leaves, he thinks, full well knowing he’s being fatalistically, petulantly dramatic. The Minotaur’s labyrinth, and him without a ball of yarn to lead him back to the exit.
He’s about to call out for Martin and Tim again when he hears it – a voice, coming from farther down the tunnel. It’s too faint for him to make out the words, but it’s the voice of a person, and –
Jon picks up the pace, gritting his teeth against the pain.
As he gets closer, the sound resolves itself into words –
“- and there, I think, we are brought just about up to date. I have enjoyed our little trip down memory lane, but past here lies only impatience.”
- And the tunnel seems to lurch –
- And the air begins to bend –
- And time goes thin and soupy around him –
- And he stumbles again, tripping hard against the stone brick wall, except –
There is no wall , and instead he is standing in a small living room, bright with the flames in the rustic fireplace. There is a pair of worn, mauve chairs on either side of it, and that’s as far as he gets, because –
Because there is a man sitting in one of them, and he is reading from a piece of paper. His long hair has been pulled away from his face, which is covered in scars, and his hands are shaking, which must make it hard to read, but he is showing no sign of stopping, and his face –
That’s
Jon’s
face. It’s
his face
, but it’s wrong. His lips are twitching against the words his mouth is making. He is crying, even as his voice stays steady, staring wide-eyed at the page. If he has noticed Jon, he makes no sign of it. The air around them is hazy, heavy like a storm waiting to happen, gathering. There is a faint ringing in Jon's ears.
“ You who watch and know and understand none ,” the other Jon intones, voice taking on harsher, harder angles. Jon stares at him and this is all wrong , whatever is happening cannot be allowed to happen , but the other Jon is still giving his dread invocation, “ You who listen and hear and will not comprehend – ”
A crack of thunder nearly drowns him out, but he doesn’t seem to notice. The words come out barbed and bloody, fishhook-pulled from his throat, and he has to be stopped.
Jon moves without thinking beyond that, beyond the sudden, sharp impulse of it. He launches himself at the man in the chair, yanking the paper out of his hands and swatting at his face and shoulders in blind panic, covering the other Jon’s mouth with his hand, anything to make him stop, but he can still feel the other Jon's mouth move against his palm, can still hear the words, clearer than they should be with a hand in the way. With a burst of desperation, Jon pushes forward, clamps down harder. The other Jon has three-day-stubble that’s rough against his fingers, and his skin is clammy and cold. I don’t think I can kill my alternate universe self, Jon thinks faintly, and then the chair tips backwards, sending them toppling over onto the floor.
The impact knocks the breath out of him, jangling through his body in a way that threatens to make his vision white out. There is a faint ringing in his ears.
The other Jon has gone still beneath him.
“ Shit ,” Jon hisses, and moves his hand away.
The other Jon doesn’t move. He stares up at him, mouth hanging open, face still wet.
He isn’t reciting anymore.
Jon swallows nervously.
“Are – are you all right?” he asks.
“You’re,” the other Jon says. He stops, frowning. “Those look – the Prentiss attack?”
“How did you know?” Jon asks, and immediately feels ridiculous. The other Jon gives him a flat, smirky look, like he’s about to make some smart-arsed comment, but before he can speak, his eyes go wide and pained.
"Oh," he says, very faintly.
"What?" Jon asks, but the other Jon doesn't answer. The air turns heavier and heavier around them. They stare into each other's eyes. There is a sound like the ringing of a bell.
And then the other Jon disappears, and it's just him.
-
He is still on the floor when the cabin door opens. It’s been quiet up until this point, except for the crackle of flames in the fireplace. He doesn't know how long he has lain here, legs still half on top of the toppled chair, mind full of static. He is in pain, and it is quiet, and he has been too busy panicking to do much of anything else. Registering things like the flow of time has been beyond him.
But now the door is opening and someone is coming inside.
Jon's breath sticks in his throat. Possibly he should be hiding, but he isn't really in a position to do so. Better to face whoever is coming sooner rather than later, he supposes.
Besides, if the other Jon was staying with them, they must be … well. If not friendly , then at least not immediately homicidal.
"Jon?" the someone says, and their voice is familiar because it is Martin's voice.
“M-Martin?” Jon manages.
He sees Martin’s shoes before he sees anything else. They’re hiking boots, still too new for scratches or signs of wear, edges caked in new mud. Jon has never seen him wear anything but faux leather shoes or cheap trainers or, recently, a variety of slightly office-inappropriate patterned socks.
“ Jon ,” Martin says again, urgent, and then his hands are on Jon’s shoulders, gently pushing him up into a sitting position.
It’s Martin, but he looks different, too. His hair is streaked with whites and greys. It has grown out a bit, and a curl threatens to poke him in the eye, slipping past the thick black frame of his glasses.
And his eyes are -
Were they always that colour?
“You - ?” Jon says, but that’s as far as he gets before Martin’s face shutters. Jon has seen him flustered before, has seen him scared, has seen him have a frankly remarkable range of expressions over spiders and Jon’s attitude toward them. He has never seen him like this, blank and cold like the arctic tundra.
“What did you do to him?” Martin asks, voice flat. His hands tighten minutely on Jon's shoulders.
For a moment, he can’t make the question resolve into something that makes sense. “What?”
“If you hurt him, I - you’re -” Martin stops mid-sentence. His eyes flick quickly back and forth across Jon’s face, widening and narrowing in the span of seconds. “Is this - what is this, some kind of Thirteen Going On Thirty situation?”
“I don’t know what that means?”
“It’s - never mind,” Martin says. He loosens his grip on Jon’s shoulders and bends his head, making a small, frustrated sound. Outside, the sun has broken through the clouds; it slants in through the window and turns the grey streaks of his hair bright silver. “Prentiss, right?”
“Yes,” Jon says, stiffly, reaching for formality to paper over how utterly overwhelmed he feels. “I lost track of Tim and,” he pauses, but only for a second, “Martin.”
“... huh,” Martin says. He sits back on his heels, chewing on the inside of his cheek. His eyes turn distant; there’s a sudden absence that feels nothing like the Martin Jon knows. “You never said.”
“I’m not -” him , Jon starts to point out, not him yet , but Martin cuts him off.
“I know,” he says.
“Maybe he just didn’t tell you,” Jon says. “When he came back.”
“Maybe,” Martin says, with just a hint of dubiousness. He pushes himself up from the floor, reaches out a hand to help Jon stagger to his feet. “Tea?”
“I, ah, yes,” Jon says.
Martin gives him an assessing look. It is frankly alarming. “You still pretending to prefer it without sugar?”
“That’s.” Jon clears his throat. His skin goes hot and cold and prickly in the sickening, swooping way that comes with seeing another person and realising that they in turn are seeing you , too, in the small ways that matter because they don’t matter. “You knew?”
“You told me,” Martin says. It’s the first time Jon has seen him - this Martin - smile. It’s small, just a gentle upward tilt, but it changes him, makes his eyes go soft and sweet. “I suppose it must have been after the Prentiss attack.”
“I suppose,” Jon says. It snaps Martin out of his reverie.
“Right! Right. Yeah,” he says, clapping his hands together. “Sugar or no sugar, Jon, what’ll it be?”
Standing like he is, half outlined by sunlight, he looks like and unlike himself all at once. Like and unlike Jon’s Martin, really, and for a moment Jon waits for it to feel strange to think about his Martin in those terms, my Martin , but the feeling doesn’t quite arrive.
He doesn’t know what to do with that.
Still, Martin, the other Jon’s Martin, looks like a spot the differences picture in the golden light of early afternoon. Familiar, but not too familiar. A missing step at the bottom of the staircase, leaving you stepping down with a little too much force, a slightly misjudged trajectory.
“Sugar, please,” Jon says, and saying it is both easier and harder than he feels it should be.
“All right,” Martin says. He goes to the kitchen nook, fills up the kettle, flips the switch with a sharp click . With his back still turned, he asks: “What happened after you got lost in the tunnels?”
Jon sits down in one of the rickety chairs at the rickety table by the kitchen window and tells him, mouth moving without much input from his brain. Martin has his back to him the entire time, fussing with the cups and the tea bags and the milk and sugar. His hands go fluttering and still and fluttering again, like waves coming and going. His back is a tight line of tension.
Jon finds himself unable to look away. There is something in his throat that he can’t quite name, that he can barely make out the shape of, and he swallows between words to clear it, but it sticks, lodged in. Like a bicycle left leaning up against a tree for decades until it gets swallowed up into the wood, owner unknown, discovered only when it is well and truly stuck there.
His leg twinges painfully under the table.
“He couldn’t stop reading it,” he says. “I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t stopped him, but I knew somehow that I couldn’t let it happen.”
Martin’s shoulders are hiked up to his ears, as though he’s expecting a blow.
Hearing Jon’s … testimony, for want of a better word, might just pass as a blow, he supposes.
“And then what?” Martin asks, words clipped and emotionless.
“I, ah, tackled him, which stopped the chanting,” Jon says. “We looked at each other for a moment. Then there was a ringing sound, and he disappeared.”
“And that’s it?”
“Yes,” Jon says. “Nothing else happened before you came in.”
“Right,” Martin says. He turns around, mugs in hand, and his mouth is a tight line. “Thank you for telling me.”
He sets a mug down in front of Jon. It’s emblazoned with a cartoon highland cow and the words WELCOME TO SCOTLAND in an obnoxiously cheerful font.
“Thank you,” Jon says automatically.
He takes a sip.
It tastes perfect.
“Oh,” he says quietly, without meaning to. His face goes hot.
“Yeah,” Martin says, softer, with a note of something like pride threaded through it. “You’re welcome.”
Jon finds it suddenly difficult to look directly at him. He takes another sip of tea instead, to keep him from embarrassing himself any further.
“Is that what he was reading from?” Martin asks, nodding at the scattered papers on the floor like it isn’t obvious. At Jon’s nod, he gathers up the pages and then skims them, frowning harder with each section.
Jon watches him out of the corner of his eye and drinks more tea.
“Right,” Martin says finally, slamming the papers down on the kitchen table and himself down into the chair. ”Actually, fuck this.”
Jon nearly chokes on his tea, and spends what feels like minutes coughing on it. “Sorry, what?”
“I’m not sure if telling you about what will happen to you in your future will change our present, or if it will create some kind of offshoot timeline for you, but at this point I honestly don’t care,” Martin says. He is white-knuckling his mug ( Thistle Be A Nice Cuppa! , though the letters have started to wear away at the edges) and leaning forward across the table with a frankly feral intensity. Jon finds himself leaning in toward him without meaning to.
“You’re just as likely to create a causal loop,” he points out.
Martin gives him a look that is part annoyance and part fondness so strong it hits like a brick through a stained glass window. “Okay, so then it won’t matter if I tell you.”
“... Right,” Jon concedes reluctantly.
“Have you got a recorder with you?” Martin asks him.
“How did you - ?”
“Know? That’s a long story, trust me,” Martin says. He smiles like a knife. “I’ll tell you all about it if you get that tape recorder running.”
-
Martin tells him about the Not Them and the Circus and the coma. He tells him about Gertrude and Jurgen Leitner and Gerry Keay, about Sasha and Tim and Melanie King and Georgie and people he hasn’t met yet. He tells him about Elias Bouchard, who is really Jonah Magnus, and his averted plan to start the apocalypse.
Jon takes notes and feels sick to his core. There is a faint ringing in his ears.
Afterwards, they go outside. Jon can’t really walk too far, and Martin doesn’t want to go too far from the cabin in case the other Jon shows back up again, so they end up leaning on the stone fence around the property. Jon gets the sense that the possibility of the other Jon showing back up again is the only reason why he isn’t halfway to strangling Elias - to strangling Jonah with his bare hands.
It’s unsettling, on top of all the other things, to see Martin like this. A wrongness that isn’t quite wrongness. A Martin with his edges worn down into different shapes, separated by time and trauma.
Jon finds himself wondering how his Martin would react to this. He finds himself wishing despite himself that his Martin was here.
The sun is setting in earnest now, colouring the sky in pinks and purples, the edges darkening black and blue. It’s colder than it had looked from inside the cabin, and the air smells like wet mud. Jon takes deep breaths and feels a little as though he is having an out of body experience.
He doesn’t know what to do with all of this yet. Instead, he keeps getting caught on details.
“How did you escape the Lonely?” he asks, running a finger over a mossy gap between stones. Martin had been frustratingly vague about it.
“ Oh, ” Martin says, with a small laugh that reminds Jon of his Martin. He turns bright red. “That’s, haha. I, uh, I suppose I should probably … tell you about … that.”
“Right,” Jon says.
“Right!” Martin drags a hand through his hair and gives another awkward little laugh. “I, er, don’t really know how to explain this to - well, to you, to be honest? As you … are, at the moment.”
Jon frowns at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We’re together,” Martin says.
Jon stares at him, dumbfounded.
Then it clicks.
“ Romantically? ” he asks. It comes out sharper than he means it to, but Martin doesn’t flinch. Instead, he rolls his eyes.
“That’s what it means, yeah,” he says, teasing.
“I don’t - I never,” Jon sputters. Thought of you that way , he doesn’t say.
“There’s no pressure,” Martin says. “You don’t have to feel like you - like you need to . It’s up to you.”
“Unless this is a closed loop,” Jon points out.
“Yeah, okay,” Martin says, “and then we don’t have free will and it doesn’t matter anyway, but also, for the record, I don’t think so.”
“Oh, well, if you don’t think so,” Jon says. He shoots a small grin at Martin, who grins back. He thinks about this Martin and his Jon, living together in this cabin for weeks, and finds it difficult to imagine beyond indistinct, blurry outlines. He thinks about his Martin, stuck in the tunnels with Tim, and then, somewhat guiltily, he thinks about Tim and Sasha as well.
About Jonah Magnus, standing with his hand on the switch and waiting .
“Jon?” Martin asks, suddenly close enough that their elbows are almost touching. “Are you all right?”
Jon blinks up at him. His head hurts. “I, ah. Yeah.” He swallows. “You and … the other Jon. Are you happy?”
Martin seems startled at the question. He looks away, smiling. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. And I don’t know about Jon, but -” - his voice turns even softer - “ - yeah. Yeah, he seems happy.”
“That’s,” Jon says. “Good. That’s good.”
“Yeah,” Martin says. He sighs, pushing away from the fence. “Want to get something to eat?”
-
They eat frozen pizza and play half a round of yahtzee before Jon’s headache spikes badly enough that he has to stop. He sits very still in the creaky kitchen chair with his eyes closed, trying to keep his breaths even and slow. His ears are ringing.
“Can I get you anything?” Martin asks. “I think I have some Ibuprofen somewhere.”
“It’s fine,” Jon manages.
“Okay, that is clearly not true,” Martin says. “Are you-?”
He is interrupted by a sudden bang coming from the other side of the room.
Jon and Martin startle to their feet and turn as one to stare at the source of the noise, which is -
The other Jon, leaning against the side of the fireplace and wincing.
“ Jon ,” Martin says, and practically launches himself across the room.
The other Jon looks up at him, and the affection is written all over his face, over his entire body. It’s strange and a little uncomfortable, seeing a part of himself that still isn’t a part of himself on display like this. The other Jon’s hands go up to cup Martin’s face with devastating tenderness, and Martin’s arms wrap around the other Jon’s shoulders and pulls him close until their foreheads are touching. They are talking quietly to each other, but Jon can barely make out the sounds behind the ringing in his ears. There is a sensation of pressure increasing, and -
The other Jon turns away from Martin to pin Jon with a look that leaves him feeling flayed open and overexposed.
“Thank you,” the other Jon says, and somehow this cuts through the whining din. “I dealt with the Not Them for you.”
Martin says something, too, but Jon can’t make it out. There is a deafening rush of bells -
- And then Jon is standing in the tunnels again, but this time he isn’t alone. Tim and Sasha and Martin -
his
Martin - are standing farther down the tunnel, all in various states of unease. Jon feels stupidly happy to see them. The tape recorder whirrs quietly in his pocket, and while whatever comes next will undoubtedly be terrifying, he feels ... something like possibility, edges still undefined, reverberating through his bones like the humming of a bell.
Farther down the tunnel, Martin looks up, spotting him. His face breaks into a smile. It doesn't have the depth of fondness and care of the other Martin's smile, but it's familiar, and it leaves Jon feeling ... well. There is possibility there, too.
"Hi," he says.
“Hi, Jon,” Martin says. “Welcome back.”
