Work Text:
“Statement of Jonathan Sims regarding Martin Blackwood. Read by Jonathan Sims, The Archivist.
“Statement begins.
“I am intimately familiar with the sensation of fear. Any avatar must be, but I would hazard a guess that The Archivist, above all, knows that specific, creeping tug of dread at the viscera in a way that is quite unique. And my guesses are… well, they’re fairly reliable, these days.
“As Archivist, I feel it is amongst my duties to make an attempt at properly categorising instances of fear. Not in the way I used to, as products of drug-fuelled hallucinations, mental illness, or outright lies. No, I know better now. I know so much, and I must categorise these statements according to the entities they feed.
“Usually, this is a simple process. You see a fire, or a pit of flesh, and it doesn’t really take advanced powers of deduction to fit these into their boxes. Sometimes it’s a little more challenging; lines can blur. You see an infestation of spiders swarming over an abandoned building, and you have to make a call; Corruption or Web? Even so, by now, I’ve learned to — ah — pull at those threads, until things become clear. Sometimes a lack of clarity is in itself a data point. Things are obscured, around the Stranger, and they twist around the Spiral.
“What I cannot gain clarity around, however, is the matter of Martin Blackwood, and the utterly unmatched terror he elicits in me.
“Elias presumably hired him, and assigned him to my department. Without my prompting or knowledge, I note. The Eye, then, is a candidate worth considering. Martin has always been the most attentive of my assistants, though that bar is set exceptionally low. These days an assistant who isn’t actively hoping to murder me is uncommon.
“Still, Martin looks at me. He’s the only one that does, barring the occasional wary sidewards glance. None of the others will even meet my eyes, and he watches me. When I can find him anyway. He’s been so distant, lately.
“What does the Eye gain from observing itself? Is the fear it feels from this exponential, or merely recursive? I feel as though I’d know, if it was the Eye. Yes. I would know. And I’m not scared of him seeing me. Not really. If anything, it’s more terrifying how good it is to be seen. To have at least one person not flinch away from my very existence. The Beholding isn’t the one using him against me.
“Martin looks at me with those wide calf-eyes and I cannot read them. He sees me and I feel unlike myself. This would be an odd manifestation of the Stranger, but wouldn’t any encroachment of the Stranger into the Eye’s territory have to be unusual, so as not to be immediately identified and cast out? Still, Not-Sasha was able to elude detection for a frankly embarrassing length of time, so perhaps not.
“No, I do not think that Martin could be working for the Stranger. There is a part of me which finds him so deeply, comfortably, familiar. Familiar to the point of being a little… careworn… almost. I have watched these last years in the archives etch themselves into his face until he seems to be fraying like the old cardigans he wears. There is nothing Strange to me in Martin’s face, or any part of him.
“Nor can I rationally entertain the notion of Martin being part of the Hunt. Unless perhaps his quarry is the nearest teabag. He must certainly count among the foremost natural predators of the humble camellia sinensis. He is diffident to the point of being utterly ineffectual most of the time, so I cannot lay this fear at the feet of the Hunt. No matter that my heart beats like some cornered and frantic prey creature, beating at the — somewhat incomplete — cage of my ribs sometimes, when I think of him.
“Likewise, there is no touch of the Slaughter about him. He massacres nothing more than my patience, or perhaps my peace of mind. I have been so worried about him lately, since Peter Lukas…
“Anyway. It isn’t the Slaughter. If only the other players were so easy to dismiss. Perhaps the Spiral has him; he is altogether too easy in Helen’s presence, and it isn’t difficult to imagine the many ways she could take advantage of that. He creates an element of uncertainty in my life that I can only imagine would amuse her, opening doors on pathways I could have sworn were never there before, futures I never would have…
“I sit at my desk to work and instead here I am recording this statement. My day distorted, my composure twisted. He opens my office door to offer me a cup of tea and I lose half the morning to nothing at all, trapped in the endlessly expanding corridors of my mind. It is nothing so insipid as daydreaming, I am certain. Daydreaming is something Martin would do. Not me.
“But Martin does not lie. At least, not successfully. He is utterly without guile. Artless to the point of transparency. It doesn’t take the Ceaseless Watcher to see through any of his pathetic attempts at deception.
“Perhaps what I am mistaking for the Spiral’s infinite twists are actually a manifestation of the Vast. The world is wider, somehow, larger with him in it. And more than that; he feels so far from me, as though even when he’s barely out of arm’s reach, those scant few feet are an unimaginable gulf. As though any space between us at all is an intolerable infinity.
“But I’m a fool. The Vast? What sort of idiot am I? The fingerprints of the Lonely are all over him. Always have been, and it’s worse than ever now, thanks to our new boss. I’m sure I am fine bait these days too, isolated as I am from everyone. Martin is merely a twist of that knife. A reminder that even in company, I am so, very, alone.
“Oh, but then sometimes he smiles at me, and I feel that I could never be lonely with that smile, not if we were the only two in the whole world.
“I doubt I make him feel the same. For all that he seems less intimidated by The Archivist than the others are, I can’t attribute that to any sort of fond feeling he might hold for me. More likely it is the same idiotic goodwill that makes him chat with Helen. The Lonely, nipping at his heels until he grasps for any sort of connection, even with those whom he should rightly eschew.
“Still, I wish I knew how he felt. Even the slimmest thread of hope that there is anyone left in this world who cares for me is a cruelty. That Martin might… I wish I knew.
“I could know. I mean, I wouldn’t. Of course I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do that to Martin. But… I could.
“What a coup it would be for the Dark, the Archivist willingly blinding himself. Closing his eyes on knowledge that would be so easy to… so inviting. A fruit, heavy with sweetness, just begging to be plucked and held. Tasted and known…
“I…
“No. I won’t do it. And it isn’t because I’m mired in some kind of eldritch Darkness. I am merely clinging to what shreds of decency a creature like myself can retain. I have fallen so far. So very far from the world of men, from Martin’s world. And the thought of that, the thought that — more than all the horrors that I have suffered, all the horrors that I have become — the thought that I have fallen out of reach of Martin, of being the kind of person that he could… of being a person at all.
“It’s like a weight on my chest. A shroud over my face. It’s like…
“It’s like The Buried. Of course! I don’t know why I didn’t see it. It’s an oblique approach, but damned effective, if It is responsible. I am crushed beneath his regard, trapped in this inescapable orbit around him, like an asteroid pulled from its course and yoked to his gravity.
“And yet, at the same time, there is a lightness to the very fact of him. He makes me feel this airy liberty that comes from being what I now am and still having one good man who has not turned his back on me. Martin could never be the lock on my prison door. He is the arm reaching out to me between the bars.
“Reaching out, and worming his way inside me, deeper than Jane Prentiss ever could. The marks he has left on me are more indelible than any scar, and yet… Can I call it a corruption? The Archivist could be corrupted by Martin, its pure and abstracted fear muddied by ties to the sticky and human. But Jonathan Sims? To the extent that he… that I…
“Jonathan Sims is not corrupted by him.
“And it isn’t the Flesh either. As much as I am disquieted by a persistent and unprecedented longing for the comforting heat of him beside me — the grounding touch of his hands in mine — as much as I am driven to the point of madness by the way every tension in me uncoils when I walk into a room and catch his scent in it and know that he is close… his bulk is soft, and it is safe. His flesh is beautiful to me, not horrifying.
“Is it the Lightless Flame which burns inside me at the thought of him? The Desolation that I feel when he is gone from me? There is such a goodness to him that it hurts me, thinking of him wrapped up in all of this. The world could have been good to him, if he had been allowed to truly live in it, but we’ve all of us lost that potential, as surely as if the Archives had burned to the ground with all of us inside.
“The thought of that, of Martin dying… The End has always seemed the least of the fears, somehow. The least interesting. The least insidious. Almost childlike in its directness. And I’ve been close enough to it now, for long enough, that it almost doesn’t seem worth being scared of anymore. No more pain, no more struggle, you just… stop. When life is this hard, death is more peace than peril.
“I’m scared of Martin dying though. Terrified, in a way I could never muster for my own death. Because my death is the end of fear, but if Martin dies, and I have to go on without him, knowing that I failed to keep him here with me… The death of Martin Blackwood would be the extinction of everything I have left to fight for.
“That still isn’t it though. Of course I’m scared of Martin dying. He’s my coworker and I’m not a complete arsehole. Besides, that isn’t the whole of the fear he elicits in me. It is so much greater than fear for his safety. Yes, I’m scared for him. But I’m also scared of him. I’m scared of hurting him when he’s with me. I’m scared of losing him when he isn’t. I’m scared of the ways that this place is changing him, and the ways that he’s staying the same as I’m changing and leaving him behind. I’m scared of what I’ll lose, when I’m no longer someone he can look in the eye, and what I might become then, without him.
“The fact remains that however infuriatingly unquantifiable, however immune to categorisation or analysis, the fear that Martin Blackwood elicits in me is by far the most…
“Ah. Martin. I didn’t hear the door open. I… suppose it would be too much to hope that you didn’t hear any of that?”
“Are either of us ever that lucky, Jon?”
“I suppose not. It isn’t… what it sounds like, though. I wasn’t…”
“You weren’t what? Being a human being? Displaying basic compassion? Haven’t you ever considered that you care about me? I mean. Not me specifically. All of us. You know, generally. I know the others wouldn’t say it, but we all know what you’ve gone through to try and keep the world fron ending. You went into that coffin for Daisy, and that isn't the first stupid thing you've done for us.”
“This isn’t…”
“It doesn’t have to be a big-F Fear every time you get a bit nervous about the safety of your colleagues, you know. Especially when the institute has such a dramatic rate of turnover amongst archival assistants. Maybe the Ceaseless Watcher’s special little boy is still, actually, just a man? Somewhere in there? Honestly, Jon. I can’t even… Look. I just came to tell you I’ll be unavailable for a while. I’m working on a project for Peter and I can’t be distracted. So there’s no need to be worried if you don’t see me around the office. Goodbye, Jon.”
“Wait, Martin, I—”
“I said goodbye, Jon.”
“... statement ends, I suppose.”