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The sun rises clean and gold over the city that, two worlds ago, used to be called London. It is a beautiful dawn, but all dawns are beautiful now. Far above the shining city and the sparkling line of the Thames, the tower stands, scorched and scarred but still whole, a dark, unnatural blight upon the landscape. To most, it appears unbreachable; solid stone with no obvious entrance, the perfect prison to contain its sole prisoner.
Impossible or not, twice a week a man ascends the spiral staircase up to the room at the pinnacle, bringing a piece of the outside world to the man who waits there.
The room is impossible, too. Once it stood high in a tower at the centre of Millbank as it sank beneath the marshes; later, it was the centre and fulcrum of a nightmare kingdom, a singular point of perfect Sight.
Now it is huge, distended far beyond what its exterior dimensions should allow, a cavernous, airless place piled with drifts and mountains of papers like a dragon’s horde. There are windows, though not nearly enough to light a space of that size; still, it is illuminated by an ever-present and sourceless glow, bright enough to read by.
Jonah reads. He gags on the words as they pour down his throat, a heavy, choking stream of terror and pain thick like clotting blood. When he reaches the end of the page he pauses a moment, grimacing, and strikes a match, though where the match comes from he could not say. It doesn’t matter. He will always have enough matches.
He brings the paper to the little sputtering flame and lights it, feels the heat of the fire racing through him, burning the words out, the tide of them turning to hot ash in his mouth. The flame creeps down the stick of the match in his left hand and down the heavy paper in his right, which, if he looks closely enough, is emblazoned with a familiar owl crest. It singes his fingers and they blister, splitting redly at the tips only to heal immediately, though by now they are permanently blackened with scorch marks that will not scrub away. The fire dies, and for a moment there is quiet.
Then he picks up the next. Only about seven point four billion left, now. He has been here a long time.
::
Today would be Tuesday if such things had meaning anymore, and Jon has brought him food again, by the scent that rises from the basket under his arm. Jonah glances up but does not otherwise acknowledge his visitor.
“You look a mess,” says Jon abruptly.
Jonah shrugs. There is no mirror in this room, and even if there were he does not think he would be likely to recognise himself in it. The world, remade, will not bear a man to wear the corpse of someone he once murdered, so Jonah is himself again, in name and in form. But it has been long since he wore this face, and it fits strangely on him. He’s far past putting any stock in his appearance, anyway. Who will see him?
“Here,” says Jon. “You should eat something.”
The scent of food pulls something from him, a strange sensation, novel and not entirely comfortable. Once, he might have recognised it as hunger, a simple body-hunger for food rather than something more esoteric. Instead he just gazes at the basket blankly until Jon snorts and looks away.
“Or don’t. It’s not as though it actually matters to me.”
But it must on some level, or else he wouldn’t continue to make the journey up the steps. More for this reason than any other Jonah reaches out, takes a roll in his fire-marked fingers, steaming and crumbling, and eats it slowly. It tastes good, which is to be expected, but the weight of tangible food on a tongue accustomed to paper words is almost enough to make him sick.
“Who this time?” asks Jon.
“Corruption. A woman named Iris.”
Jon tilts his head as though chasing a song half-heard, a memory half-forgotten. Jonah doesn’t know how much he remembers. He’s never asked.
He picks up the next paper.
Dust and smoke hang low in the air and Emil cannot breathe...
When he has choked through Desolation-scorched lungs and looks up again, Jon has gone.
::
He comes back again three days later, this time bearing a single flower, aquilegia, a wild columbine in a brilliant indigo in a simple blown-glass vase. He places it in a window which obligingly has a sill to receive it.
“Good morning,” he says. Jonah sets down the paper he has in his hand—Reggie Aaron, Flesh.
“Thank you for the roll,” he says. “It was good.”
Jon blinks in a way that indicates he’s quite forgotten about his last offering. There have been so many, after all. “You should eat more often,” he says awkwardly.
There is a silence. Jon looks out the window. The morning is brisk with high white clouds sailing loftily through a brilliant blue-gold sky.
“Who this time?”
Jonah tells him.
“Why do you do it,” says Jon, and it’s not a question anymore, like it was the first or fifth or fiftieth times he’s asked. Like every time previous, Jonah does not respond. This is a well-worn ritual and it will not change today.
He does not reach for another paper. Jon will leave if he starts reading, and today, he thinks, this silence can stretch a little further, encompass a little more of the endless future. They have nothing to say to each other—or perhaps the problem is that there is too much to say, words that are known and yet need to be spoken regardless, like the statements, like the papers.
Silence is easier.
When the silver-bright sun starts burning heavy and gold with the late afternoon, Jon leaves without a word.
::
Jonah does not sleep—if pressed, he’d say he sees no purpose in it, but the truth is that it simply never crosses his mind—but he does go through cycles of being more and less aware of his surroundings, dragged under the tide of ink only to resurface hours later with only the echo of distant pain left to him.
Sometimes he wakes from his reveries to find the topography of the room has altered around him. Today, there is a mirror, an old-fashioned cheval-glass, framed simply in brass. There is a part of him that will always belong to the century of his birth, and this place responds to it.
Subtle, he thinks, remembering Jon’s comment about his appearance, but really he has only himself to blame. This place is his labyrinth; like a dream, he may not control precisely what happens here but it comes from him all the same.
He does not look in the mirror. He tries to flip it around but both sides have glass, so instead he pushes it into a corner and waits for the tides of change to wash it away again. He doesn’t know what’s more frightening, the prospect that it will never return or that he’s caught in a loop of himself, forever rehaving the same thoughts and revelations.
Then again, he doesn’t suppose it actually matters.
::
“Melanie says hi,” says Jon.
“Really,” says Jonah.
“Well—“ says Jon. “She said something.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
In fact, he is surprised that Jon’s friends know about these visits.
“They don’t like it,” admits Jon, “but I’m through with shutting them out.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“No. Here; I brought you a coffee. You like that more than tea, right?”
“Mm. Is it poisoned, by any chance? For old time’s sake?”
Jon just gives him a look and sips his own. Jonah takes the mug. The liquid in it is still steaming, despite the open cup and the length of the climb. Of course. It smells like too-early mornings at the Institute, finalising budgets and donor meetings. Better times, he thinks, though this is, objectively, untrue.
He takes a sip. It’s good. Of course.
“I thought you preferred tea,” he says after a while.
“I can’t get it the way I like it anymore,” says Jon, “and anything else feels like a compromise.”
::
It surprises Jonah just how open Jon is, these days, though he suspects that for all he claims not to shut people out, many of the things he tells Jonah are for his ears alone. Some twisted form of confession, perhaps, or perhaps it’s just that they know each other far too well and there’s a certain freedom that comes with having passed so far beyond the mortifying ordeal of being known.
“Everyone’s moving on,” Jon says one day, over the flame of the sweet-scented candle he’d brought. “Melanie and Georgie are adopting. They’re moving up to... well, to what used to be Scotland.”
“Time doesn’t work anymore,” says Jonah conversationally, “but subjectively speaking, it has been a long time. And they always were resilient.”
“I don’t think I know how to. Move on, I mean. Sometimes I think it’s never over for me, and it never will be.”
“If you’re looking for advice, well,” and Jonah gestures loosely to the room of papers. He’s been through another thousand, or maybe another ten thousand, it’s hard to tell. Time doesn’t work anymore.
“Why,” says Jon, reflexively, no longer even hoping for an answer.
Jonah just stares at the flame of the candle for a long time, and slowly passes his fingers through as he’d used to, centuries or millennia ago, before electric lights. He pauses with his permanently scorched fingers in the flame. It’s hot, but it doesn’t burn him like his matches do. Jon winces anyway.
“Stop that.”
“As you wish.”
He withdraws his hand and tucks it into a pocket.
“Who this time?”
::
The mirror is back again.
Jonah runs a hand through his hair. It’s auburn again, like it used to be, and eternally cut in a style that belongs in the nineteenth century, one he can dimly remember liking. His freckles are back, too; once the bane of his complexion, though styles have changed and clear skin is not longer the mark of beauty it once was. Probably good; when he’s gone long enough without sunlight he tends just to look sickly. Though he hasn’t actually been outside properly since the Change. He is the anchor of this place, this last remnant of his handiwork. If he leaves it behind it will crumble to dust, and he does not know what he will do without it.
He pushes the mirror back into its corner, but haphazardly, and by pure chance it ends up at an angle that reflects the room. He considers tilting it up. Doesn’t.
It’s still there when Jon visits next, bringing with him this time a knotted wreath of willow-wands and leaves stained bright with the colours of autumn.
::
“Why are you here?” asks Jonah. He is tired. It shows in his reflection.
“Mm, to bring you a scone. You should actually eat this one; they’re good.”
“Jon.”
“They are. I’m not just saying that because I made them.”
“Jon.”
“Okay, I had help. But Daisy says I’m improving.”
Jonah says nothing. He is so tired. There is a long pause.
“Why are you here, Jon?”
“I am your Archivist,” says Jon.
When Jonah laughs it is with a bitterness that startles him. “The world does not work like that anymore. You are Jonathan Sims, nothing more and nothing less. Martin saw to that.”
“And yet, I am your Archivist.”
“Those are damning words.”
“For both of us. The truth often seems to be.”
::
The scone is actually decent, even if he cannot for the life of him imagine Jon baking. From what he knows of his life now, it’s not actually out of character, but whenever he tries to imagine Jon doing the things he tells him about all he can see is the Archivist on his throne, crowned in eyes and wings and wearing terror like a robe.
He picks up the next paper. He, at least, has always been predictable.
::
“Who this time?” Today, it’s Jonah doing the asking.
Jon is empty-handed for once. He leans heavily against the windowsill, long skirt blowing a bit in its draft.
“Basira. Argentina, of all places. She’s been learning Spanish.”
“You knew she’d get restless eventually. She needs a challenge.”
“And so does Daisy, even if she’d never admit it. I know.”
“It’s just you, then.”
“I have other friends.”
“Do you?”
“...I talk to Oliver, sometimes.”
“Hm.”
“Oh, like you’re in any position to judge. When was the last time you had a friend? Even before, I mean.”
“I kept myself busy.”
“God, no wonder the Lukases liked you. Always wondered how you managed to get them to fund us.”
“Valuable favours.”
“Oh, really?”
“It’s not half as scandalous as you’re probably thinking. It was usually information for money. Symbiotic, if you consider that they usually used the information to make more money. Rich people are remarkably predictable.”
“Huh. Yeah, I suppose that sounds right. You and Peter, though... do you ever...”
“Miss him?”
“...yeah.”
“Do you want me to answer that, or do you want me to answer the question you really meant?”
“Don’t be an arse. Fine. Both.”
“I don’t know. If it’s right to miss someone you killed. On a personal level, I don’t know that I actually miss him at all. We were never as close as you and Martin, no matter what the gossip said.”
“Technically, I killed Peter.”
“Technically, Martin isn’t dead.”
“None of this is actually helpful.”
“Oh, I know.”
::
“At least I’m trying,” says Jon, one day. “At least I’m trying. And that’s more than you. I’m not... I understand, okay? But this—“ and he indicates the room, “this is so goddamn pointless.”
“I know.”
“Don’t—you don’t get to just say that. If I have to try, if I have to, to fucking live, then so do you. Do you hear me, Elias? You don’t get to just fucking hide up here forever.”
Jon doesn’t see that Jonah cannot even try, that there is nothing left for him in the world but to eat his own regret, one page at a time, and burn it from the world until all that is left is ash. Perhaps when that task is done he will be free, or perhaps he will find another, even more empty and promethean.
Jon equates their roles because he is an idiot, and because he has never once given himself the benefit of the doubt. He cannot acknowledge that even at the end of it all, when they’d fallen into each other, hungry and desperate and drunk on the Apocalypse, that even then their roles had not been congruent, that Jonah had been the actor and Jon still, mostly, the acted upon.
He says nothing because there is nothing to say. After a long moment, Jon turns on his heel and leaves, back down a flight of stairs which only sometimes exist.
::
Jonah doesn’t have a very clear sense of time, but even he notices when it stretches and stretches and Jon fails to return.
Well. There are always more papers. There are always more matches.
::
Time passes. A lot of it, probably. Sometimes, he catches a glimpse of himself as he strikes a match, reflection pale and wreathed in fire, and he watches until the flame burns down to his fingers.
::
He is very alone. Peter would be proud; he almost wishes he could see him now. Then again, that would rather defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?
::
There are always more papers.
::
One night he throws the mirror out of the window, which is accommodatingly open and large enough to fit it. He watches as it disappears into fog halfway to the ground, and wonders idly what that looks like from outside. Do people even look, even wonder about the strange, broken tower anymore? Surely they must know what it houses, who sits here, year after year, choking on the remnants of their fear. Would it be better or worse if they have forgotten?
There is a sill on the window, a flower on the sill. He climbs onto it, knocking the vase over, and looks down, bracing his hands against the sides. He doesn’t know how high up he is, probably because there’s no actual measure that could quantify this place. High. The fall wouldn’t kill him, of course—or would it? Dream logic never stopped applying, and he supposes it might be symbolic enough; the would-be king, cast from his tower.
Even after all that has happened, he is afraid.
He climbs back down.
::
He had never paid much mind to the window before, but after he cannot ignore it. It has taken to no longer keeping out the elements. The wind blows through, picking up and swirling his papers, the rain and snow come in at the corners to soak them. On warm days, insects buzz and dart through the room, landing on his arms as he reads. His freckles start creeping onto his hands during the summer, only to retreat again when the weather grows colder.
He looks out more often now, counting the passing of the seasons and watching the city lights gleam below him, the stars above, somehow as brilliant as they would be in the country, far away from the light pollution of London. Once he had watched them grow dimmer by the year as technology crept in and the city sprawled out. He wonders what Simon is making of it all.
You can no longer see all of the world from the tower, but you can still see much farther than should technically be possible. Looking at London, he wonders which of the lights belongs to Jon, and further, at Scotland, which belongs to Melanie. (Argentina is much too far; besides, Basira and Daisy have probably moved on by now. It occurs to him briefly that Jon might have, as well, but that seems wrong. His Archivist cannot leave the city of their victory, of their destruction, of the rift in the world where his love threw himself to seal the terror away forever.) (Perhaps he has. Perhaps Jon has finally let go.)
The mirror doesn’t return.
::
Jonah hears the telltale sound of footsteps in the stairwell, which exists today. It’s almost shocking, after so long on his own. He runs his hands through his hair nervously before cursing himself for a fool. The steps are Jon’s; he’d know them anywhere. He can have nothing to hide.
Then there is a second set, slower and quieter, but with a weight to them, and the trepidation returns. Has Jon decided to conscript someone to drag him from his tower? Would that even work?
Jon looks different; as lean as ever but somehow more substantial, a little less like a pair of haunted eyes dragging a frail frame around by sheer force of will. He gives Jonah a long moment of eye contact with a meaning he cannot parse before stepping aside. The man who emerges behind him looks considerably less well than he did the last time they saw each other, and is eminently familiar.
“My God,” says Jonah.
“Elias,” says Peter Lukas.
::
Jon watches as Peter stumbles up the last few stairs. He’s still weak, even after all this time in the new world, still terribly diminished from being torn nearly to shreds by the Eye’s gaze.
Of all the things he’s done, that is one Jon still cannot quite bring himself to regret. He looks at Peter and he thinks of Martin—don’t think of Martin—he thinks of all of Peter’s victims and he feels a quiet, swelling rage deep in a part of him he’d long since thought hollow. The fear in the man’s face when he’d finally found him had made him feel a vicious pleasure, followed by the familiar sickness at himself.
It is not dissimilar to the way that Jonah sometimes makes him feel, when he forgets his own complicity, when he forgets to forget that he’ll never know or be known better by anyone.
He watches Jonah’s face pale, watches him freeze like he’s been struck to stone, watches him jerk forward as though pulled by invisible strings. Jonah puts his hands out and catches Peter’s arms, though whether it’s to steady Peter or himself is unclear. Perhaps both.
“I’m sorry,” he says, simply and rawly.
Peter catches him. “Yes,” he says.
It is somehow so much more unbearably intimate than if they’d said “I love you”. Jon cannot be here; he cannot witness this. He aches through with something like envy, like resentment, like grief and strangely like catharsis. He catches Jonah’s eye almost on instinct, then retreats back down the impossible stairs. When he leaves there is a finality to it; he does not think he will ever see the tower again.
He goes home and makes himself a cup of imperfect tea, and resolves to call Melanie and Georgie in the morning.