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Most archaeologists, in Jon’s experience, would find themselves, sooner or later - and usually sooner - being walloped around the head by Indiana Jones references. Their mug collection would be slowly infested by smirking Harrison Fords. They would find themselves the weary owner of at least two ill-fitting costumes, complete with fake plastic bullwhip. And they would field a thousand tired variants on ‘Why did it have to be snakes?’
He, it seemed, was the sole exception. No one, on meeting Jonathan Sims, could ever remotely confuse him with Indiana Jones. When he mentioned his profession, the image that leapt immediately to mind, was, not a fedora and several films’ worth of thrillingly perilous adventures, but a man who did dull, meticulous research and spent hours getting moderately excited over pottery shards.
Jon really, really wished that this was the truth.
~~~
“Heeeey, Boss! So, we’ve got a bit of a situation.”
Tim smiled far too widely at Jon, the brightness reaching a notch above even his normal, eye-dazzling, levels, which meant that this particular ‘situation’ was going to be one that Jon disliked even more than he generally disliked such matters. Not exactly ideal, when situations (intensely disliked) seemed to constitute an alarming proportion of his life.
There had once been a point - for the whole of his university career and a year or so afterwards, before the ‘promotion’ - when Jon had really enjoyed his work. He loved the research, the attention to detail, the sense of caretaking something bigger than himself, the deductions you could make from small, important clues. The things you could learn, plucking tiny nuggets of pure truth and understanding from the dirt.
And he had loved, though he hadn’t fully realised it then, the mundanity of it all. Archaeology was a fascinating field, but, despite the odd fictional representation and the occasional show like Time Team, it was not, at heart, a glamorous one. Sometimes, a find would break through into the mainstream and capture the popular imagination, but for the most part the work was quiet and unsensational. Important, in its way, and useful; but not showy.
And certainly not even slightly supernatural.
Or so Jon had - perfectly reasonably - assumed. Until he had become accidentally caught up in his very first ‘situation’ and his life had been abruptly wrenched away from the quiet and pleasantly unremarkable path it was on and threw him headlong, and sideways, into a chaos which, so far, didn’t show any signs of having an exit.
“So, Sasha was doing some standard safety checks at Hell’s Caverns …”
Ah. Well that probably explained Tim’s overly cheerful approach to explaining just how awful this was going to be. Not because it actually lived up to the name - ‘Hell’s Caverns’ gave a wildly misleading impression of what was merely an unusually well-preserved Neolithic flint mine, with a modest gift shop - but because it involved underground tunnels and darkness and tight spaces; all things which had not bothered Jon in the slightest, just a few years ago, and which very much dug their fingers deep into his amygdala and played creepy horror tunes on it, now.
“I assume it didn’t pass.”
“Not quite, no. Showing definite signs of imminent disruption.” Tim shot him an apologetic glance and a sort of resigned half-shrug, before sugar-coating it, unconvincingly, with another sunny smile and a soft, coaxing tone. “She doesn’t think it will get any higher than Level Two, at least. So, there’s that?”
Given that the scale was 1-5, with 1 being the absolute, potentially world-fracturing, worst, that was the very opposite of encouraging. But Tim had somehow developed the idea that Jon would up and bolt if spooked; and that speaking to him in a manner reminiscent of someone gently explaining to their cat why the pills that were currently being forcibly shoved down their throat were a good thing, actually, would somehow prevent this outcome.
But it wasn’t as if bolting would do him any good. And while he might not have asked for this role, that didn’t mean he didn’t feel responsible for doing it right.
“Level Two.” Jon heaved a small, aggrieved, sigh at the universe. “Fine. I’ll get the kit.”
He really wasn’t looking forward to this one.
~~~
Time being very much of the essence, Tim had flown Jon straight to the site in the emergency helicopter (which he insisted on calling ‘Joe Whirly’ for reasons best known to himself). It wasn’t, as it turned out, quite fast enough.
“You let a school trip down there?”
Jon was working on his temper, he really was, but the idea of children facing a Level Two outbreak overrode all of the ‘How to be nicer to people’ tips which he kept in his top desk drawer, for easy reference (underlining the most important ones, occasionally, in the hope this would magically reinforce them in his mind).
Sasha just glared back at him, with an equal ferocity.
“I didn’t ‘let’ anything, Jon. I explained, very clearly, that the site didn’t pass safety checks and needed to be closed down immediately and, as far as I was aware, it had been. Everyone was actually really cooperative, which I suppose,” she made a slightly rueful expression, “should have been my first warning sign. Then I had to deal with a phone call from the B-team, who honestly, shouldn’t be allowed out unsupervised …”
Jon made a sympathetic noise; while they were pleasant enough, personality-wise, he still wasn’t sure how the ‘Oblivious Twins’, Robin Lennox and Sebastian Skinner, had got through the recruitment process; let alone been allowed to work together.
“… and that, of course, took over an hour to sort out, in a private room which they were quite happy to give me - and yes, Jon, I should probably not have trusted that it was simple human thoughtfulness, but sue me for being optimistic - and by the time it was done and I could check on things, the school trip had already showed up and,” she gritted her teeth with rage, “it seemed there had been a miscommunication about the ‘being completely and unequivocally closed’ thing.”
“I see.”
And Jon did see. Places like this, which were largely reliant on tourism for funding, did not exactly enjoy advertising any safety issues, but they were usually responsible - and sensible - enough to realise that it would be a whole lot worse to ignore the warnings and risk an actual accident occurring.
Unfortunately, there was a certain stigma and scepticism around anything related to the Archaeological Containment Office. Few people knew exactly what they did, but the little they did know led to the AOC often being treated with hostility, scorn, or even outright dismissal, despite their official backing.
The ‘Superstition Police’ was a common nickname, amongst those who thought they knew: riled up - understandably enough - by the assumed indulgence of prejudiced and harmful ideas, like ‘Mummy’s curses’ or the stupidity of believing in what they thought of as ghosts. Even so, Sasha was good at using what she called her ‘thin veneer of reasonable human behaviour’, as well as some judicious use of cheerful threats, where necessary, to persuade people to quarantine their sites, until Jon had neutralised the danger.
It wasn’t foolproof, however. Occasionally, Sasha would allow her true, and much weirder, self to pop to the surface, a little too obviously. And, even when she didn’t, there would always be people who thought they knew better. And who didn’t see why they should go through all the hassle, questions, disappointment and loss of income involved in turning a prebooked group away, not because of any tangible physical threat they could see and appreciate, but merely based - from their perspective - on ‘spooky vibes’.
It would help if they had larger teams and some sort of documented credibility, but the budget was ridiculously small, for such an important department. They had had to fight hard enough for the helicopter. As for credibility, they were in the awkward position of having their work be a leaky, half-hearted secret, which was neither shut tightly away, nor in plain sight, but sort of shoved awkwardly into a corner, where it was devoutly hoped nobody would look too closely.
The problem was, that the government did not really want anyone taking them seriously, at the same time as they desperately needed them to exist. They were both a necessity and a deep personal embarrassment.
Jon had found it disturbingly easy to slip into that role.
None of this mattered right now, of course. Far more important was getting the kids out immediately; and safely.
_____________
Martin Blackwood wasn’t actually claustrophobic, but he didn’t really enjoy enclosed spaces. There was some primal instinct inside him, which kept reminding him that bad things lurked in dark places, while helpfully leafing through his mental thesaurus and providing him ever more sinister words on the theme of ‘trapped’.
It didn’t matter, though, because he had his class to focus on. No time for indulging in feelings of slow, creeping oppression, when you were busy reigning in the kids who were just a little too gung-ho and keen to dash off into tunnels, while unobtrusively soothing and reassuring those who were finding they didn’t quite like the ladders, or the eeriness, or the way the walls got just a little more emphatically wall, the longer you were surrounded by them.
He exchanged a glance with Basira - who generally worked with older kids, but had volunteered readily enough to provide additional supervision for the trip - and was comforted to see that she was showing no signs of his own, deeply aggravating, inner fluster. Something which he was usually able to control in front of the kids, but which leaked out quite often, outside of the classroom.
Their guide raised her hand and gained, quite impressively, most of the available attention in the room. For a short time, anyway. There was a lot more information about flint, and its various uses, than most of the kids were really interested in, but they did perk up a bit at the mention of skeletal remains.
“And, in this tunnel, we found a curious arrangement of …”
“I’m sorry, but you need to leave.”
Martin blinked up, startled, at the three people rapidly descending the ladder. They each wore some sort of boilersuit and backpack combination, which made Martin’s mind hover, for a moment, in the general region of Ghostbusters, without completely settling there.
They clustered at the bottom of the ladder, when they arrived: two tall and politely smiling figures, and one shorter one, with bright, compelling eyes and the body language of a cat who had been stroked the wrong way.
Ruffled Cat spoke first, with the sort of clipped, officious annoyance, which made Martin both bristle and shamefully wilt, at the same time.
“You all have to leave, right now.” He took a breath and visibly forced his voice to be softer. “The mines need to undergo some … emergency maintenance. It’s not safe to be down here.”
The taller guy smiled at Martin and Basira, and then at the kids; far more conciliatory, but with firmness underneath.
“But, hey, I hear there’s free apology ice cream for everyone, just as soon as you get back up!”
This went down predictably well and also somewhat smothered Basira and Martin’s questions, as they were immediately preoccupied in ensuring that no one hurt themselves, by trying to break ladder speed records for the sake of ice cream. But Basira was very good at corralling the kids, and she took the most wobbly and ladder-shy up first, remaining on the surface to keep an eye on everyone, and help up those who faltered near the top, while Martin supervised the ascent from the mine.
The three unexpected visitors helped; or, at least, Tim and Sasha - the friendlier of the trio - did. Ruffled Cat (who introduced himself as ‘Jonathan Sims, Head of Containment for the ACO, London’, but seemed to answer well enough to the less daunting ‘Jon’ ) just hovered and paced by the tunnels, practically humming with tension.
Martin took advantage of Tim and Sasha’s competence at kid-wrangling to slip quietly over to him and speak in a low tone.
“Could you, maybe, just … not look so much like the walls are going to collapse and we’re all going to die? I think you’re freaking out the kids.”
Jon glanced over at the remaining children - who were currently doubled over laughing at some sort of story Tim was telling, and Sasha’s deadpan interjections, while they waited their turn to go up - and gave Martin a sceptical look.
“Fine, fine. You’re freaking me out.” He stared at the murky tunnel, to which Jon’s attention had almost instantly returned, and which looked perfectly innocuous, as far as he could tell. You know, for a cramped, dark, sinister opening, beneath the earth; deeper even than a grave. “The walls aren’t actually going to collapse on us, are they?”
“It’s a possible outcome.” He looked back, caught Martin’s expression and looked unexpectedly apologetic. “But, ah, probably not?”
His demeanour shifted to one remarkably similar to one of Martin’s kids, when he caught them breaking a rule; then he reached out and awkwardly patted Martin’s arm, in what was clearly an attempt to be comforting but came across more like a clumsy kitten, making their first experimental swipe.
“I’m sure it will be fine.”
He bestowed the world’s least convincing ‘All good!’ smile on Martin.
Martin swallowed down an unexpectedly complicated mixture of emotions, which would be better off unpacked and examined elsewhere, and turned his attention firmly back to his class.
They seemed to be taking this perfectly well. Childhood was like that, sometimes: being constantly told to do something, or to stop doing something, or to do something else, without any full comprehension of why; and while mostly thinking of something far more interesting.
Go down the spooky hole, get out of the spooky hole, it was all much of a muchness. Only a few had seemed actively troubled and Basira had cannily got them out first. Martin smiled at his last few charges and firmly soldered on his best ‘calm and reassuring’ demeanour, over the rising sense of dread.
This was just a safety precaution. The walls were not closing in on them, with a gathering sense of menace. There would be fresh air and sunshine and ice cream, in just a moment (he rather hoped that offer didn’t just apply to the children).
It was fine.
The last child had made it safely to the surface and Martin was only a little way behind, when there was a sharp, panicked shout and then the world did something distinctly alarming and entirely beyond his frame of reference to comprehend. All he could fully grasp, was that he fell; and kept on falling.
~~~
“ …es, thank you Tim, I’m perfectly aware …”
crunchy. static. bittertangyellowhard.
“… back! Just keep back, take care of Martin. I can handle …”
crunchycrunchy. staticstatic. purplenauseasideways.
“Jon! Shitshitshitshitshitshit …”
b-sharp. melancholy. tuesday.
“Okay. Okay, I think … I think it’s … done. Are you … okay?”
“Oh, yeah, just peachy.”
“I think half of my brain may have been replaced, at some point, by a venomous sea sponge, but, you know. Other than that, fine.”
“Martin? Martin, it’s okay now. Everything’s fixed. Just … breathe, alright?”
Martin blinked and felt normality settle cautiously over and around him, like a nervous blanket. He breathed. It was weird to be so viscerally conscious of the action, but grounding, too. He revelled for a few moments in the fact of having lungs and being able to operate them with a reasonable level of skill, before the world around him came back into focus.
He was sitting in the main chamber of a flint mine. There was a hard, poky ladder behind him, solid earth beneath, and nothing was doing anything particularly odd or distressing.
He was hit by such a profound relief at this fact, that he very nearly fell over with sheer gratitude.
“Whu … habbled …”
Martin paused in dismay, as he reviewed his attempt at a coherent sentence and gave it an E for effort. Not quite back to normal, then.
“It’s okay. I remember my first time with this, it was a serious mindfuck. But it’ll pass, I promise.”
Tim’s hand rested on one shoulder, Sasha’s on the other and Martin clung to the sensations like a lifeline, trying not to shake as hard on the outside, as he was doing on the inside (‘Always so pathetic, no backbone, just like your father’).
“Do you, ah … would you like a hug?”
Jon was hovering in front of him, with concern radiating off him so hard that Martin could barely take in any other details. He reached out and hauled Jon into his arms before the invitation could be rescinded; or his own brain could sabotage this primal need, with second guessing and thoughts of social discomfort and worthlessness.
“Right. I’ll take that as a yes.”
Jon felt just right in his embrace, like he had been measured and tailored to fit and Martin let his hindbrain just soak in and appreciate the fact, while the rest of him began to slowly piece itself back together.
It took about five minutes before he felt capable of attempting speech again.
“What. The fuck. Just happened?”
Jon shifted slightly in his hold; not so as to escape, it seemed - though Martin’s arms instinctively tensed around him, to discourage such a distressing eventuality - but so that he didn’t have to speak directly into Martin’s shoulder.
“This is … going to be difficult to understand.”
Martin found himself feeling weirdly better, from the tiny flare of anger that gave him: something real and human and himself.
“Try me.”
Jon looked at him with an utterly stunning intensity, for a moment - don’t get distracted, Martin, physics just went kablooie, this is not the moment for spontaneously improvising sonnets - and nodded.
“Okay. So … time is not quite so fleeting as is commonly accepted. Things don’t just happen and then they’re gone, it’s more that it all piles up on itself, the used pieces of time settling and compressing like sedimentary layers.
“For the most part, this amounts to the same thing as it being gone. It’s not like you could just reach down through the layers and relive a section of the past whenever you feel like it. Nor is it in anything like the state it used to be. Sometimes you will get a … fossilised event, as it were, which would be recognisable even to the non-expert, if you could reach and examine it, but, mostly, the past is more like crunched-up shards, compressed and mutated out of all recognition. At least, not without specialised tools, to determine the composition. They’re actually really interesting …”
Enthusiasm had begun bubbling into his voice, like a sudden and delightful spring, so Martin was a little disappointed when Sasha interrupted.
“Martin really doesn’t need a detailed breakdown of your chronoscope, Jon.”
“Right, sorry. So, all of this is perfectly normal and, usually, doesn’t cause problems. Except when certain conditions, which aren’t yet fully understood, come into play and it goes all, ah …”
“Trifle Mode,” Tim put in helpfully. He grinned at Jon’s affronted glare.
“That is hardly the technical term, Tim,” Jon took a breath and glanced back at Martin, still clinging to him with the pathetic desperation of the helplessly lost. “But, I suppose it might be helpful for visualisation.”
Martin’s brain did, indeed, immediately try and put what Jon had just been saying into dessert form (with extra sprinkles). He wasn’t particularly convinced that this helped.
“So … the past just goes all sponge and custard?”
“More accurately, what happens is that the layers lose their rigidity and become liable to a certain amount of instability and mixing. Crumbs sneak into the jelly, as it were, and the custard swirls through the cream. They don’t blend cohesively, but you can get them all together in one mouthful.
“Except that, in an actual trifle, the layers complement each other. Or, well, they’re intended to,” Jon’s expression was decidedly clear on the matter of whether or not he, personally, approved of trifle. “Whereas, in the case of the past, things can go … badly. Very badly.”
Martin considered the last few minutes - and, huh, would that time already be forming a layer of its own? - and strongly seconded the ‘very badly’.
Sasha, who had sat down against the wall, at some point, and was fiddling with a complicated looking instrument, gave him a sympathetic smile.
“It’s not always this much of an issue. Most of the time, there’s just the tiniest amount of bleed through. Barely enough to be noticeable.”
“There are five main stages. Level Five is what happens …” Jon considered for a second, “you know when you get a particularly strong sense of a place? Nothing concrete, just a feeling of deep connection with the past. Many people don’t even sense it.”
Martin had been on plenty of other field trips, both as a child and a teacher, and he had visited a few National Trust properties, whenever his budget allowed. He’d rarely got exactly what he wanted from them, that sense of truly rubbing shoulders with history - most often he had ended up glazing over at yet another portrait of some constipated looking figure in a ruff - but there had been certain moments. Enough that he kept on trying.
Maybe that was what he’d experienced. A faint molecule of misplaced jelly.
“Levels Four and Three are when it gets a little more noticeable. That’s the main cause of what people think of as ghosts.”
“That’s my favourite part,” Tim added, with clear enthusiasm. “Actual chunks of the past pushing to the surface. Mostly they’re fractured and insubstantial, but you do get the occasional specimen through almost intact.”
“Which is not always a cause for celebration.”
Jon gave Tim a pointed look and was met with a sigh and a slight concessionary shoulder movement. Evidently there had been some less than enjoyable ‘ghost’ encounters in their shared past.
“But incidents like that are perfectly manageable. It’s rare that any actual harm is done and, for the most part, it just requires monitoring, in case of escalation. Every genuinely haunted area in the country is either subject to periodic inspection, or has a time-leak sensor discreetly fitted.
“If it reaches Level Two, or above, however, that’s a lot more serious.”
Jon shifted again slightly, in his hold, as his voice took on overtones of ‘This is Extremely Grave and Important’ and it was only then that Martin fully, completely, acknowledged to himself, that he was using a complete stranger as an oversized teddy bear.
He should probably let go. He should definitely let go.
Just as soon as his arms got the memo.
Jon was getting a lot more incomprehensible for this bit. Apparently the trifle metaphor had been deemed too frivolous to cover ‘traumatic era-bleed’, ‘temporal distortion’, ‘reality fractures’ and other, more technical phrases, which sounded as though he’d swallowed a textbook and was vomiting it up in entirely the wrong order.
Sasha jumped in, just as Jon was getting into over-enthusiastic detail on ‘chronological scarring’.
“Basically, it seriously screws with reality.”
Jon glared, then sighed.
“In very simple terms, yes. The layers are not compatible and time, in general, can be a volatile substance. When it all runs together, it creates pockets of a very hostile and unpredictable environment. And the effect is not as straightforward as simply making you relive the past or something similar, because it’s too deeply interwoven with space and perception and reality. ”
“It’s like if you ate a spoonful of trifle and, instead of the flavours just mixing together in your mouth, they turned into weird, brand new flavours. And also explosions.”
“Yes, thank you, Tim, for bringing it back to dessert.”
Martin tuned out the playful sniping while he tried to get his head around all of this. It made … well, no, it didn’t make sense, exactly, kind of the opposite: but it was undeniable that things had got pretty incomprehensible for a while there. In retrospect, the almost endless falling sensation - as if he were plummeting to the beginning of time itself - was his favourite part, because at least he had some sort of frame of reference for it.
It was deeply disconcerting to have experienced something for most of which he couldn’t even approximate a description. Words had always been his friends before - sometimes his only ones - and now they could do nothing but sit about helplessly and shrug.
Martin peeled his brain forcibly away from even trying and reached into his mental toolbox for his very best ‘I am being incredibly normal and calm’ persona.
Which abruptly reminded him that a normal and calm Martin really ought to be looking after his students and not engaged in extended cuddling sessions at the bottom of mine ladders.
He forced his arms to finally release Jon and pulled himself to his feet.
“I need to get up there. My kids …”
“Are just fine.” Tim steadied him, with a gentle hand. “I went up to check when you started death-gripping Jon, here, like your favourite blankie.”
Martin could feel Jon carefully not looking at him, just as hard as he was not looking at Jon.
“The leak didn’t reach beyond the mineshaft, only just enough to make things a little off and confusing for a moment. So, as far as they’re concerned, there was a small earth tremor which knocked you off the ladder and you got a little shaken up by it, but not hurt. Basira said to take your time.”
If anyone could handle a class of ice-cream fuelled eight year olds, it would be Basira. Still, Martin had recovered enough that guilt, and his innate need to help, were overriding the whole ‘getting hit by the oozy layers of time’ thing; and they did have a schedule to keep. Martin genuinely had no idea how long he’d been down here and the idea of keeping the coach waiting for him was almost as upsetting as … whatever the hell he’d just been through.
“Thanks, Tim. But, still I should get back. I just need to … really not think about this for a bit.”
To Martin’s surprise - the fall having felt so long and abstract, that he’d almost forgotten he must have landed, at some point - he did actually have some bruises, which made themselves known as he ascended the ladder. It was this (he told himself) and not the shakiness (and poorly suppressed terror) which made it take so much longer to reach the top than he’d expected. But the surface didn’t reject him, this time, and he clambered out with a sense of such profound relief that it was all he could do not to sink to the ground and water it with grateful tears.
A lot of questions were running through his head - did that all really just happen? How were the others not affected? How did they make it stop? - but the sight of one of his children sneaking up on another one, with the sticky remains of a mint Cornetto and evident nefarious intent, quickly snapped him back into teacher mode; and gave him a comfortable normality to cling to.
(He did not wish that he still had Jon for some rather more literal clinging).
By the time he had soothed the third bumped knee, listened to the children’s absolute joy at getting their very own baby earthquake and helped Basira usher everyone back inside the coach, he could almost pretend that the whole thing had never happened.
Almost.
_____________
Finishing up at the site tended to be a matter of routine: a soothing checklist of precautions and the only part of the job that Jon still enjoyed (or so he told himself, because any and all strange sensations of ‘thrill’ in the face of danger and excitement were very much against his character and could therefore be summarily dismissed).
First, he had to double-check that the leak was truly stopped and no stray particles of the substrata of time remained. He had a gauge for this, similar to those which Tim and Sasha used to detect issues, but he tended to find his own senses more reliable, especially when it came to trace amounts. Despite Jon’s appreciation of the professional air his tools lent him - and the small pretence they gave him that he was separate from his role - the science of time-control had not made any really significant advances since its infancy. Which was the main reason Jon was stuck here, perhaps the sole person in the country who actively longed to be replaced by technology.
As it was, being far more supernaturally attuned to time in general, and to ‘dead’ time in particular, than his instruments, he could make a much more accurate assessment of any problem areas and whether the problem was truly fixed, or simply quiescent, with a high likelihood of recurrence.
This seemed to be the former, thankfully. Jon might hate his job and, most especially, the way he had had it forced on him, but he had somehow managed not to mess up too spectacularly (yet). Thankfully so, given that he had, several times, been called on to assist with particularly severe cases outside the UK (and by ‘called on’ he meant being tracked down, summarily stuffed into the fastest available mode of transport, and almost literally thrown at the problem, like a human fire blanket).
Some of those occasions had been … challenging. The memories hung, like treacherous cobwebs, in his mind, ever ready to snare his attention, and wrap him in painful, ensnaring thread, the moment he dropped his guard. But he had a duty to perform and that made it easier to wrench himself free and attend to it.
Having established that the site itself had been neutralised, the next step was checking in with Sasha and Tim. They both had a certain natural resistance to the effects of time-mixing - part of the reason they had been recruited - along with rigorous training and a good deal of experience in coping with the aspects that did affect them; but that didn’t mean they were completely immune. And this had been a very bad one. Not quite Level One, but certainly flirting with it.
Martin, being a civilian, had had to be handled more carefully. People, as it turned out, did not always react well to being hauled off for mysterious and compulsory ‘testing’, immediately after going through the most traumatic experience of their life; even if the doctors were very polite about it and offered stickers and lollipops for good behaviour.
Therefore, unless any symptoms were immediately concerning, the first priority was removal from the situation, when stable, with follow-up care given after a short period of recovery time and with as much pretence of there being a choice in the matter as possible.
Jon spared a thought for hoping they would be gentle with Martin, before finally allowing himself to focus his attention on his team.
The more in-depth tests would be covered by their regular precautionary check-ups, but there were a few basic checks to cover, to see if there were any points of more immediate concern.
Tim glowered at him, as usual, and argued that they were both ‘demonstrably fine, Jon, just like always’ but he dutifully gave his name, birth date and current year, walked in a straight line, and flawlessly recited the poem ‘Antigonish’ which - for some reason which had never been adequately explained - was almost impossible to say correctly, when suffering from time-sickness.
(How this particular fact had been discovered was another mystery; something which annoyed Jon almost more than being forcibly recruited).
“ … Oh, how I wish he’d go away.”
Tim pronounced this with a rather directed emphasis, but Jon just nodded and ticked Tim off as clear, with a relief he was careful to keep hidden. Sasha and Tim were prone enough already to tease him about his supposed ‘mother hen’ tendencies. He hardly wanted to fuel the fire.
Sasha rattled off her name, birthdate and the year, with an air of patient indulgence of Jon’s wild and whimsical insistence on completing mandatory health checks, and managed to walk in a very straight line indeed, with no issues.
It wasn’t until she confidently started the poem - which they all knew by heart - with ‘Tomorrow night, upon the stair’ instead of ‘Yesterday’ that Jon realised they had a problem.
Or, as Tim put it, with feeling: ‘Fuck.’
~~~
“I feel perfectly fine.”
Sasha crossed her arms, radiating an understandable frustration at being confined to a hospital bed while feeling entirely well. But Jon knew her well enough to detect the slight wobble underneath. Sasha was well aware of the potential side effects of time-sickness and was more than smart enough to be scared.
Mild cases were certainly possible, with no more than a few days of temporal uncertainty and bouts of intensified memory. But, more often, it started small and then escalated, like a rolling stone which didn’t stop at merely gathering moss, but plunged headlong into strangling vines and poison ivy.
Thankfully, Jon had just enough tact (and a triple-underlined section on his ‘being nicer’ list) to prevent him from pointing that out.
“It’s just a precaution. I’m sure it’ll wear off soon.”
He glanced over to Tim for back-up, but found him sitting rigidly by Sasha’s bed, having worn himself out of Obnoxiously Cheerful Mode about an hour ago and settled, instead, into a sort of clenched and angry preemptive grief, which was both surprising and painful to watch. Jon had always been the pessimistic one. It felt bizarre and wrong to have to take up the cheerleading role and try and work out how to wrangle imaginary pompoms, on the fly, because someone needed to stay positive for Sasha and he was the only candidate available.
And not just for Sasha. When they had reported Sasha’s illness, it had triggered a more urgent response on getting Martin properly checked out, as well; so, instead of a polite phone call and the arrangement of a convenient appointment within three days, he had been called on by their emergency medical personnel and given one hour to pack for a potentially extended hospital stay.
Being whisked through a number of confusing tests, with little comprehensible explanation apart from the emphasis on how serious things could get, could hardly be a reassuring experience.
Right on cue, the door to the ward opened and Martin was wheeled back in and decanted firmly into bed. He exchanged a sympathetic glance with Sasha, then turned to Jon with an air of flippancy pulled so taut, that it didn’t so much hide the fear and frustration underneath, as highlight and emphasise it.
“So, when you were explaining the whole trifle of time thing, you didn’t think to mention that the custard might kill me?”
“It won’t kill you, Martin.” Jon wasn’t sure why he was so emphatic about that, but he felt something welling up fiercely inside of him, at the idea. “Or Sasha. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything, but, with such a comparatively brief exposure, it’s very rare to have any major side effects. It didn’t seem particularly comforting to bring up the possibility, when you were still recovering.”
Time-leaks of any real severity were not actually that common - despite how it felt to Jon, when he was being casually pinged across countries - and it was even less so for people like Martin to be caught up in them. In most cases, the health checks were passed without issue and the trickiest part was left to the PR department, who would pay a friendly visit to discuss why it was not in the public interest to mention anything to anyone.
There was nothing so formal as an NDA and nothing so crude as a threat - and certainly no budget for bribery - but surprisingly few people had actually talked. Jon had met some of the staff in Public Relations - Nikola Orsinov and Simon Fairchild sprang immediately to mind - and they had the sort of cheerfully intense persuasiveness which grabbed you by the scruff and left you limp and unresisting as a kitten.
Besides which, the surreal nature of what happened made it difficult to explain out loud to anyone who hadn’t been there. Running to the press with a tale of how time was really runny, actually, and melted your brain, was unlikely to win you a favourable response from even the least rigorous of tabloids.
Most people simply shored themselves up with the classic defence mechanisms of denial and repression and got on with their lives. There would come a point, Jon imagined, when the full truth would come out, but he doubted that it would be all that dramatic, in the end. On a global level, there wasn’t so much an active cover-up as a near-universal agreement that the whole business was an active embarrassment on the part of physics and not something to be encouraged by giving it any attention.
Martin, thankfully, seemed to have forgiven Jon for not casually reeling off a list of the worst possible side effects, while the man was still fragile enough to somehow find comfort in Jon, of all people (not only a complete stranger to Martin, but someone who had previously assumed his personal huggability factor to be in the general region of ‘porcupine’).
He still seemed pretty determined to know the worst, however; and Jon had always found it difficult to resist the lure of an info-dump.
“Below Level Two, the risk is mostly negligible. There can occasionally be some long term psychological effects and lingering haunted sensations, but rarely anything severe.”
Or that was the official line, anyway. Jon had argued that the studies were too breezily dismissive of how bad people could feel underneath - without showing ‘clearly indicative symptoms’ - and of those who were more than usually vulnerable to the effects; but it had been made clear that his opinion on the matter was of no consequence whatsoever.
Another reminder that his position was both unpleasantly important and upsettingly powerless.
“A Level Two leak, however, can have a more direct and physical impact. For the most part it’s strictly short term, something like what you already experienced. But, in some cases, you can also contract what we call time-sickness. The effects of which, in the more severe cases, can be … distressing.”
It was, in essence, like an archeological dig through a person, excavating them, layer by layer, sometimes just a short way down and, sometimes, until it reached the bedrock beneath.
Sometimes, the person would be restored, well enough, afterwards. At other times …
But this wasn’t going to be one of those times.
Jon tried to explain all of this as well as possible (despite getting briefly bogged down in an unfortunate trowel metaphor) while pausing instinctively, at intervals, for Tim to throw in his usual cheerful additions, contradictions or jokes, and being thrown, each time, by the resounding silence. Tim’s attention remained solely on Sasha. And it wasn’t hard to see that he was already bracing himself for the worst.
They’d seen the effects before, after all. That sort of thing stuck.
Martin was quiet for a short while, after the explanation.
“So, it, what, digs up memories? Going further and further back, until infancy?”
“That’s part of it. But there can also be a more physical component. Like pulling out fragments and fossils of who you used to be.”
Martin did not looked as though he was enjoying the idea of unearthing his own fossils, but before he could express this, or anything else, there was a gasp from Sasha and she dropped backwards onto the bed, twisting in pain.
Tim gripped her hand and Jon hovered - anxious and useless, as usual - at her other side.
“Shouldn’t we call a doctor?” Martin was already halfway out of bed in pursuit of this aim, when they heard the sharp, decisive click of the door. “Are they … did we just get locked in?”
Jon should have been expecting this, he supposed.
“It’ll be a precautionary quarantine. The sickness itself isn’t contagious, exactly, but the fragments can, very occasionally, be dangerous. More importantly, there won’t be any risk of losing any this way. We’re on our own until it’s over.”
Martin’s anger resonated against his own, though Martin’s was laced with shock, where Jon’s was more threaded through with resignation. There had been very little advance in treatment since the illness had first been recognised, resources for research and study of such a widely unacknowledged condition being strictly limited.
For the most part, then, the procedure was to isolate the patient (or patients) and just … wait it out. Jon was a little surprised that he and Tim had not been replaced by trained staff - Tim having been cleared and Jon being immune, they didn’t need isolation - but perhaps the team hadn’t realised that the symptoms would hit so fast.
Or, perhaps, they were all too happy for someone else to take the risks. The cases of Jared Hopworth and Jane Prentiss, while hardly typical, were still very vivid in Jon’s memory; and no doubt to everyone who was involved. Everyone who survived, that is.
Jon’s senses flared and he turned sharply to Sasha.
“You might want to close your eyes, Martin.”
“What? Why … oh god. Oh, that is … not happening, that is so not happening.”
Tim clung to her even tighter, as Sasha shuddered, gave a small, plaintive sigh; and fractured, almost lazily, in two.
_____________
Martin had had a good few bad days in his time, but this one had already been steadily climbing up to the top ten list, even before his fellow patient started splitting in two, in a fashion which reminded him, simultaneously, of the chest-bursting scene in Alien and of the way that a piece of stone is smoothly chipped away by a sculptor, with an air of a job well done.
And, yeah, no. He wasn’t going to be thinking about that. Not just yet. His brain needed a bit more of a run-up before it could cope.
The only good part of this whole mess, so far, was that he had got to see Jonathan Sims again. There was something about clinging fiercely onto a person, for an extended period of time, which rather accelerated the bonding process; or perhaps Martin had just imprinted on Jon, in his time of vulnerability, like a new-hatched fluffy duckling. In any case, he had acquired rather more feelings about the man than he was probably entitled to, after such a brief acquaintance.
It was easier to focus on Jon, than this whole situation. Jon, with his almost comically stuffy facade and warm, soothing voice and that odd nervous/fascinated air about him, like a fawn permanently torn between aching curiosity and an instinct to bolt.
Jon, who, unlike Sasha, wasn’t currently birthing something horrible from his own body - a jagged, broken shard of self - in a way which Martin was frantically denying might lay in his own immediate future, also.
“If it helps, it’s apparently not as painful as it looks. Acccording to survivors.”
And, huh, it looked like Martin had grabbed onto Jon again. Only his hand, this time, which gave him a tiny bit more dignity than wrapping himself around the man, like a touch-starved octopus, but it was still somewhat galling that he hadn’t even noticed himself doing it.
He sternly resisted the voice in his head which suggested he go in for a hug again; reminding himself that it was Sasha who needed comfort right now. Sasha, who was Jon’s actual friend, not just an unimpressive stranger, who’d spectacularly erupted all over him, one time, like some snotty, clingy, and emotionally unbalanced, volcano.
Tim was murmuring something in her ear, his tone largely reassuring, with an edge of frantic, and Jon was using his free hand - the one which Martin hadn’t commandeered as if he was entitled to it - to help ease Sasha’s slowly peeling fragment-person free and … shit, that should really be Martin’s job, shouldn’t it? Because he was always the helpful one, the one who did the thankless tasks and lent a hand and made damn sure he was always, always useful, because what else did he have to offer?
(And quietly resented it; wrote overwrought poetry on the subject; and did it all over again).
Martin released Jon’s hand and told himself firmly to suck it up and just deal with it.
“Here, let me …”
And, god, he really, really didn’t want to touch it, that thing - that being? - that weird, distressing offcut of Sasha, which Jon was now carefully disconnecting from her with a gentleness that hit Martin right in the heart; if in a rather distant way, for now, under the sense of shock.
But the fragment was clearly heavy and Jon wasn’t exactly muscular, so it seemed like it would be helpful.
It would also keep his mind off the gaping hole in Sasha’s chest.
So he helped Jon steady the fragment and tried not to think about how it looked just like Sasha, if, say, she had been cracked and shattered and had lost about a third of herself.
It muttered incomplete sentences, through incomplete lips.
“Butterflies … overrated … oh fuck off, Tim … always preferred moths …”
“Tim, can you date it?”
Jon’s hands remained gentle, but his voice was suddenly brisk and clipped, just as Martin first remembered it. Deliberately distancing himself from emotion.
“Seriously, Jon? You want to fucking document this? It’s Sasha, not just some … it’s Sasha.”
Tim had surged to his feet, like he was considering violence, but he didn’t move any closer, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, in something like defeat.
“It can help, Tim, you know it can. If the fragments know when they are, they’re more likely to coalesce.”
Tim’s face twisted, but he took a breath and nodded.
“It’s from a few weeks ago. We went to the Butterfly park together. Uh, Sunday the third.”
Jon nodded and shifted the fragment carefully onto a chair, so that he could press something in his vest pocket. A small tape recorder, Martin realised, as he dictated the information.
Fragments, Jon had said. Plural.
“This is going to happen again?”
Jon nodded at him.
“There can be from two to fifty fragments, though the average is around fifteen. The further back you go, the more fractured they are, as a rule, though occasionally you’ll have something almost intact from, say, childhood. It’s actually rather interesting how solid some early memories can b … ah. Right. Martin? I … think you might need to sit down. ”
Martin hadn’t really registered it until then; the sense of looseness around his left side. An odd detachment from his own body; and from the crack which was rapidly forming.
Jon had been right, he thought, hazily, as his brain got busily to work on shutting down all inconvenient behaviours in self-defence (such as thinking, for even a second, about what was happening right now).
It didn’t really hurt that much at all.
_____________
Martin’s first memory was the hardest to deal with, as it immediately latched onto Jon and refused to let go.
Which was, at least, helpful in dating it. It was unsurprising, too, that it peeled away almost intact, given the extreme recency and intensity of the memory. Only a few cracks, chips, and frayed edges, betrayed the fact that it was a fragment at all and not Martin himself.
Jon distracted himself from trying to comfort two Martins and - oh, there were three Sashas, now, wonderful - by wrestling with the physics of it all. It was an innately frustrating task. As each memory fragment broke away, the original person should either dwindle accordingly, as mass was removed from them, or remain as they were, if the memories were formed of some distinct and separate substance. But what actually happened, was that the original body became broken and full of holes, but not enough holes; their bodies not nearly cracked and damaged enough to account for what was removed from it.
It was more of an artistic representation of ‘shattered’ than anything logical.
But it wasn’t as if Jon really believed that logical applied to any aspect of his life, any more.
Another solid, and unexpectedly flirty, sliver of Sasha peeled away, with a cheeky grin; which, thankfully, snapped Tim out of the frozen, desperate horror which had clamped around him like a vise, and spurred him into action, as he tried to shush her gently and prevent her saying things that weren’t meant for Jon and Martin’s ears (not that Martin was likely to be able to hear much in the present, right now).
From the few words Jon accidentally caught - despite really trying hard not to - it seemed that Tim could probably date that particular memory as well. Down to the exact minute, quite possibly.
Tenderly, Tim gathered up all the pieces of Sasha into his own protection, leaving Jon to take all the Martins.
They were coming thick and fast now, many of them so cracked and warped as to be almost unrecognisable as human. One memory, for instance, was more book than Martin: a scrap of hand and pen and eye and thick pages of scribbled words, some crossed through, some underlined. Others were essentially emotions - largely loneliness and anxiety - formed into a roughly Martin-shaped mist.
There were a few teacher moments, some proud, some joyful, some awkward; but far more seemed to come with the ghostly attachment of some sort of poisonous, sucking void. These Martins were small-voiced and crumbly-edged and seemed more flattened and cowed than the others.
Jon was developing a serious dislike for the void.
It was convenient, he supposed, that those particular Martins were very obedient and settled quietly where he could keep an eye on them, but it was a deep relief to find a few other scraps of Martin’s memories which were made of pure stubbornness; a little spite; and more than a touch of anger.
Even if those ones were a lot harder to keep from causing trouble. The angriest Martin, for instance, was currently making for the window and, while he wouldn’t break it, he might well injure himself if he tried too hard.
And there were smaller and smaller Martins coming now, lost and painfully young; looking all the more vulnerable for their missing pieces and fuzzy outlines. It was heartbreaking watching them, only half aware of Jon, while most of their consciousness was trapped in whatever moment they were formed from.
He tried his best not to learn too much from their murmured words and the emotions dangling limply off them, like discount tinsel, but it was impossible not to catch a good many details Martin would not have wanted to share. Especially when Jon was still trying to get at least a rough timestamp for them all, using a mixture of context clues and his own innate knack.
If he allowed himself, he could date them all exactly, but that would involve a more invasive process than he was willing to use, except in an emergency. If they didn’t coalesce, didn’t reform into Martin as he was now, whole and unharmed, then … perhaps.
Hopefully it wouldn’t be necessary.
Jon was already wrangling twenty-four fragmentary Martins by the time that the last one broke away; a sweet, wide-eyed toddler with a kite in his hand, and the sense of a set of shoulders on which he was being carried, clear and joyous and full of sunshine.
It wasn’t the only happy memory Martin had formed, but the ratio of positive to negative was rather smaller than Jon would have preferred. At least, now, the worst of the process was done. All that was needed - ironically enough - was time. Time for the dug-out pieces of Martin and Sasha to slowly drift back together and return to their original forms.
It generally took one to two hours for the pieces to begin coalescing, and up to ten to complete the process.
(If it worked. Which it would).
The biggest risks were losing or damaging a memory, or a sense of being too unmoored in time and space to reform. And that was unlikely, here, with Jon and Tim keeping vigil, clear, and reasonably accurate, fragment dating, and the doors firmly shut. There were other factors which could interfere, most of which were imperfectly understood, but Jon had no reason to believe that this wouldn’t just be a case of trying to keep his gaggle of Martins calm, collected, and as happy as their pre-loaded emotional baggage allowed, while preventing the wilder outliers from indulging in their unexpected predilection for either breaking and entering, or - in one alarming case - arson, until they were ready to heal.
Tim was coping well with the Sashas, as far as Jon could tell; even going so far as to joke with them, in something close to his usual hearty self. Sasha’s own last memory had just spawned, by the looks of it; a toddler of similar age to the youngest Martin, clutching a huge dinosaur balloon, with small, determined fingers, and giving it the widest, most adoring smile Jon had ever seen.
Jon smiled too, a residual warmth for his friend seeping into him so hard it almost hurt. He turned back to his own flock, ready to tell another story - the first having been well-received by almost all the Martins, not just the younger ones - and stopped short.
Toddler Martin, his face still alight with joy, was no longer holding a kite; but a balloon. A dinosaur-shaped balloon.
A quick scan of the others quickly revealed that some of the Martins’ glasses had changed shape and style, to ones very familiar to Jon from seeing them resting on his friends’ nose. And a more searching look at the splintered Sashas confirmed his worst fears, as Jon noticed that a few of them carried poetry books - something Sasha had never taken an interest in - and one was now attached to a raging, spiteful void.
This was … Jon’s brain floundered for a moment, as it searched for a severe enough word for the situation; and finally settled on ‘bad’.
Very bad.
~~~
“Of course. Of course there are complications.”
Tim turned to the original Sasha, breathing soft and shallow, heart still beating, despite all the irregular gouges where her fragments had broken away. They almost seemed worse for the lack of bleeding; the inhuman weirdness to it all.
“You always have to be unpredictable, don’t you? Never make things easy.” He forced his gaze away, with a choked-back sob. “One of the things I love about you.”
When he turned back to Jon, his face was calmer; set and determined.
“But you can unmerge them, right? Just like when the time-layers mix.”
“I … hope so?”
Not quite the level of confidence Tim was looking for, judging by his expression. But it wasn’t as if Jon had had any proper training in this blasted job, let alone ever used his skills for anything like this. And, if he got it wrong, then the consequences could be anything from two severely traumatised people, to two severely traumatised corpses. Or, perhaps, just one staggeringly traumatised hybrid of the pair of them, a ragged blend of Sasha and Martin, which would be both and neither; any gaps stopped up with raw, aching grief and a dab of Polyfilla.
But there wasn’t much time and some frantic attempts at making phone calls and banging on the sealed doors had left them very clear that they were on their own, here. It was Jon, or nothing.
Jon gave them both a heartfelt mental apology, for being their only hope, and focused as hard as he could on their fragments.
This was just like doing it all for the first time, all over again: and he could almost hear Gertrude in his ear, calm and crisp, and a little sharp, with the barely restrained impatience of someone who really needs a precision instrument for the job and has been handed, instead, the Fisher-Price toy version, in bright, cheap plastic.
She’d got him through it, though. So, maybe, her memory could push and berate him through this, too.
~~~
Jon hadn’t been meant to be on the dig at all.
But the original choice, Michael, had mysteriously vanished, and then his replacement, Helen - who had been, by all accounts, very friendly and popular - was dramatically arrested for fraud, embezzlement and the murder of her predecessor (amongst others; apparently it was rather a hobby of hers). This left the team in need of another replacement, at very short notice.
Having won his place on the team with the main qualification of ‘being available (and not actively wanted by the police)’ Jon had felt like an outsider from the first. But that was hardly a new experience and the work was interesting enough to allow him to ignore any interpersonal issues - such as not, apparently, being deemed as likeable as a multiple murderer - and to appreciate the chance for genuine discovery.
Jon had always had a preference for research over fieldwork, but he had found things different on this dig. There had been a thrum through his veins, as if the past he was uncovering, in shapes and hints and fragments, was speaking to him almost directly.
That, in hindsight, was the first warning sign.
It was foolish to feel guilt about not recognising something he had had no idea even existed; about not questioning the vividness of his experience. But he held it inside himself anyway, a constant ‘what if?’ A feeling that any and all gaps in his knowledge were a personal failure.
It had happened just under three weeks into the dig. At the time, he had not understood any of it, but now he recognised it as a cascading escalation, from an ambient Level Five, all the way to Two, within a very short space of time. It was rather like an accelerated horror movie, where the sense of slow, creeping dread got about five seconds of use, before being roughly elbowed aside in favour of the running and screaming part. Or ‘curling up in a foetal ball and screaming’, in most cases.
Jon had been the sole exception. He could see that there was something happening, that the layers of everything that he understood as reality were peeling and fracturing and adopting fascinating new shapes, and, yes, it was very much terrifying; but it was also, somehow, external to himself. He could watch, without having the cracks and warps enter and affect him, in the way it was so clearly affecting his colleagues.
Jon had been unable to get to a phone, due to the whole ‘reality melting all around him’, thing, but he had tried his very best to get his colleages comfortable, comforted, and to prevent them from accidentally harming themselves, in their sobbing, unmoored state.
Jon’s best, as so often, was not up to the job.
Sasha told him, later, that the situation had already shifted to Level One status before they arrived. That there had been nothing he could have done to save them.
It was probably even true.
But it didn’t change the fact that he now held the echoes of nine different voices, screaming desperately in his head, forever, along with nine separate moments of abrupt and horrible silence. Jon sometimes thought it made it almost worse that he barely knew and - in some cases - actively disliked his colleagues. Not just because it seemed unfair to them, to remember them mostly in snatches of unkind or crass remarks, or annoying habits, or the absence of anything to hold onto at all, but because a part of him would always wonder if it might have changed things, if he’d only cared a little more personally.
That he might have been able to somehow do the impossible, if only desperation and love had been driving him on, rather than a plain and simple human compassion.
(Tim had disagreed - “I never thought I’d ever have to say this, Jon, but … quit internalising Hollywood, okay?” - but the idea had curled up and rested stubbornly in his mind, anyway, resistant to all logic and sense).
He could remember some things with too much clarity and some things with almost none. He knew that the ACO arrived fairly quickly and with a much larger team than was usual - as he’d later learn - due to the severity and urgency of the incident.
Sasha and Tim were amongst them, he found out later, helping with assessment and evacuation. But the only person who was cleared to enter the Active Level One Zone was Gertrude Robinson, the Head of Containment. She was a woman in her early seventies, with a force of personality that could level buildings. Jon would have readily believed that she could tame the chaos with little more than a withering stare, if he hadn’t immediately been recruited to assist.
Looking back, the most surprising thing about it was that, after an initial embarrassing splutter or two, Jon barely asked any questions. Getting a crash course in disentangling time somehow felt like the least disorienting and peculiar thing which had happened to him since the whole thing started (an hour, or an eon, ago) and he took to it like a penguin which had never been in water before and was shocked to discover its own grace.
It helped that he hadn’t fully understood, then, the severity of what he was dealing with. Level One incidents were extremely rare, but the damage they could cause was almost limitless. An entire continent no longer existed due to the worst such event, over a century ago; though very few knew it had ever been there, let alone what had destroyed it. It had simply fallen through the gaps of most people’s realities and been lost, even in memory. Though, not entirely, of course; time tended to persist, in some form or other. Jon had once been flown over the space where it used to exist and it had felt like being struck through every single nerve-ending, with a sorrow too large to hold.
But, back at the dig, he had been wrapped in protective ignorance of the true cost of failure. The whole experience had been terrifying, painful, and utterly exhausting, but, between them, they had teased apart the layers and settled them back in their proper places.
The rest of the team had taken over, after that, which was a relief, as once the job was actually finished, Jon’s brain made the mistake of actually thinking about what just happened and how impossible it was, and had immediately gone on strike for a bit, in protest. He remembered only snatches of the next few days.
An ambulance. Seeing the world alternately in far too much detail and almost none: from being able to make out the very pores of the universe, to slipping into a soupy blur of noise and colours and nothingness. Gertrude’s face appearing, from time to time, looking strained, but determined.
She had seemed entirely unsurprised, Sasha told him later, by the heart attack which killed her, as if death had given her a polite heads up and a chance to get her affairs in order. She had not wasted the opportunity.
When Jon came back to himself properly, it was three days later and he was now - according to a great deal of intimidating paperwork, which he had no recollection of signing - the brand new Head of Containment.
When he protested this fact - as he naturally did, at some length - he was informed that he was currently the only known person in the UK who had the ability to do the job and that, therefore, he was doing it, no argument. It was still unclear whether Jon had always had the knack, dormant inside him, without realising, or whether it had spontaneously bloomed within him, simply because Gertrude was about to die, a successor was urgently needed, and he had just been in the general vicinity.
Not special, just there. Which felt about right, for his life so far.
Things had become somewhat … eventful, ever since.
~~~
And if Gertrude really had been here - whether miraculously alive, or simply as a ticked-off ghost, who could think of far better things to do with her death, thank you, than be stuck haunting Jon - she’d be telling him to stop second-guessing himself and just get on with it.
Jon let himself stop thinking (and overthinking; and overthinking his overthinking); closed his eyes; and did so.
_____________
Martin remembered being eighteen. Squashing his hopes of university into a small, distressed ball and throwing them far, far away. Neverending shifts at the checkout for not enough pay; being a carer and a failing breadwinner and a disappointment.
Martin remembered being eighteen. The long nights of studying for his Archaeology degree, frustrated and absorbed, in equal measure. Friendship and laughter. His best friend, called Pasha (Martin remembered that people made jokes about that, their matching names, but he couldn’t quite get a handle on why). And that time the pair of them had come back to the dorm so drunk that he woke up in the bath, wearing nothing but a feather boa and a traffic cone.
The realities clashed and swirled inside him, a nauseating, impossible mixture.
His mother had just died and he was holding on to the devastation - the very real grief of it - a little harder than he should, to try and cover up the well of sheer relief which threatened to bubble up, all unseemly and terrible, from underneath. The plans, at last, for the teaching degree, which he had never had the time or money for, while caring for her. The lifting of a burden he had borne for so long.
He should call his mother to talk about it, he always did, with the hard stuff; they had a wonderful relationship. But later - he was enjoying the holiday and there was so much of Paris to explore.
Martin had never been to Paris (he’d spent a week there, practising his erratic French, having picnics by the river bank and finding small, unexpected places away from the crowds).
Martin’s father had abandoned him when he was young (he called every Sunday, to do a crossword over the phone together; ruthlessly untangling cryptic clues, while dropping in information about his vegetable garden, his rheumatism and the ongoing feud with the neighbours).
Martin didn’t care much for poetry (he had several shelves devoted to nothing else, it was his friend and solace; he needed it, not like oxygen, but like the ability to take a breath in a quiet place and to see the sunset and to have some small thing in your life that was only for you).
Sasha was scared. She was small and frightened and this wasn’t her home (it was) and these were not her parents (they were) and she just wanted to hold onto her new balloon (Super-Dragon-Kite) and close her eyes until everything was all okay and normal and safe again.
He closed her eyes.
And felt memory after memory being pulled from his throat, with a slow, gentle fanfare, like a magician extracting a myriad rabbits, oh, so carefully, from a myriad fancy hats.
It was funny how you could collapse under the lack of weight of something. Martin fell slowly back into himself, piece by piece, with a bittersweet smile at the familiarity of this feeling of aching, keening loss, sharply cut with a desperate, guilty relief.
~~~
When Martin opened his eyes, he looked straight into Sasha’s and there was a moment of recognition and connection and of crawling, wretched awkwardness, all at once. Despite the modest hospital gown and blankets, he had never felt more naked, in every sense, than he did now.
Martin hadn’t wanted to crawl into Sasha’s skin and poke curiously at the insides, any more than he wanted his own mind to be casually rifled through, and his lowest moments tried on for size, like a new set of clothes; but it still felt like a mutual violation. His raging guilt mingled with a wildly unfair resentment and anger, which he couldn’t suppress; and a profound understanding, which neither of them had asked for.
Maybe, when they’d had more time to deal with it, it would feel more like a gift.
(Maybe, if it had been Jon, instead of Sasha … except that Martin had felt him there too, somehow, and that was a whole other thing to deal with).
He sat up, slowly and carefully, focussing, not on the fact that he knew about far, far more of Sasha than either of them were comfortable with - and very much vice versa - but on the fact that he was alive and in one piece. Himself entirely, apart from the paradoxical presence of the absence of Sasha, a sensation which his brain was struggling to quantify.
“Hey. Welcome back.”
Tim looked exhausted, but his smile was warm and sincere. He had been quietly talking to Sasha since she woke, Martin belatedly registered, and he didn’t leave her now, but he did seem genuinely pleased that Martin was awake.
Martiin glanced at the chair by his own bedside, feeling an uncontrollable wave of hurt and disappointment that Jon wasn’t sat beside him - that his hand was emphatically not being gently cradled, like Sasha’s was, his fears not gently soothed, by a calming, caring voice - before he reminded himself that Jon barely knew him and didn’t owe him anything. And, besides, he was probably wary of being glomped into another interminable hug.
“He’s asleep. Memory disentanglement is pretty hard work, turns out.”
Tim’s voice, as he nodded over at a nearby bed, held a trace of amusement and Martin flushed at being so transparent. But his embarrassment melted away quickly when he finally saw Jon, thoroughly tangled in a blanket and curled up almost, but not quite, into a ball, like an untidy armadillo.
Tim was talking about something - the quarantine time being very nearly up; the fact that he should have known that if anyone could pull off the aesthetic of having incomplete splinters of themselves peeling away from their body, in the world’s most horrific moult, then it would be Sasha; something about wishing he’d learned juggling, so that he could fidget with his hands and not with his words - but Martin poured all of his focus and attention into watching Jon breathe. It was grounding, safe, a calm and comforting zone in which he didn’t have to think about what had happened to him, not for a little while.
With each steady, reassuring, rise and fall of Jon’s chest - and his slight and adorable twitches as he snuggled further into the blanket - the pieces inside Martin resettled and found their shape; something almost, but not quite, the same as before.
Learning that both reality and identity were more fragile than he had ever imagined was going to take some adjustment. Seeing how the layers of himself had built over time, with gains and losses and changes was something like a punch in the face, when he saw it laid out so clearly: the Martin he used to be and the Martin he was now, with all the signs of growth, a little shadowed by the scars on his once open nature and self-confidence; the stunted branches.
As for Sasha’s memories, they might no longer be entwined with his own, but they still lingered. Not so crisp and present as before, but more like an aftertaste, both sweet and bitter.
Sasha, he had learned, at the very heart of her, believed in herself, in who she was, that she mattered. Not more than anyone else, but absolutely not less.
Maybe that particular part of her was something he could keep. Martin really didn’t think she’d mind.
_____________
Jon woke up feeling bruised and achy all over, as if he’d dashed through a five hour obstacle course, then been run over by a lorry, all while suffering from flu.
The process of disentanglement had been superficially similar to restoring the layers of time correctly, but the complications of dealing with living, intelligent matter had made the whole thing even more difficult, dangerous and energy-intensive: like having to walk on his hands, instead of his feet, and throw in a spot of chainsaw juggling, as a fun little side hobby.
Except that that would have been far more visually impressive than ‘scowling at a point in space like it’s deeply offended you, for quite a bit, then falling over’ as Tim cheerfully informed him.
Martin and Sasha had been checked over, given follow-up appointments and cleared to leave, before Jon finished his embarrassingly long nap, but they had stuck around anyway, to make sure he was okay.
Jon was definitely not going to get emotional over that.
Not that it was really about him, of course, so much as the difficulties of coming to terms with what had happened and not wanting to part, just yet, from the only people with whom they could really talk about it. He didn’t fight too hard against Tim’s suggestion that they all stay over at his place for a day or so, to recover.
And it was more helpful than Jon wanted to admit, to be able to check on Martin and Sasha, at regular intervals, and make sure that they weren’t casually peeling off into chunks of themselves again.
The fact that he held thin strands of them within himself, now - along with traces of all the threads and layers of time he had ever sorted through and coaxed back into place - was something he found it difficult to emotionally classify.
There was guilt, of course, right on the surface and easiest to parse. A sense of responsibility. But, also, something like belonging, except more painful, because it was unearned. He couldn’t have just let them fragment and merge and lose themselves, not without trying to help; but that didn’t mean that they had asked, or necessarily even wanted, for Jon to go officiously diving about in their memories.
And now he carried pieces of them inside him like stardust, trapped in a shape they never asked for and dreaming of those past and better times, when they shone. So much of Jon, now, was shaped by eras he had never lived through; by places and feelings and events that were not his own. Tiny layers of everything he touched, leaving a residue behind.
He womdered how Gertrude had coped. Whether she had held it off, by simply being stronger than him, and more forcefully herself, or whether she had felt it closing in on her personality and crystallising around it; the crushing weight of too much time.
“ … so that’s why Sasha reorganised your filing system …”
Jon snapped to attention, turning his best and most offended glare on Martin.
“What? It’s a perfectly good system …”
He broke off, confused, as Martin grinned at him, with a mixture of amusement and apology (but far more of the former).
“Sorry, sorry, she hasn’t actually touched it, I promise, it’s just that Tim said, whenever you go all blank and distant like that, the best ways to get you out of it are either luring you back to reality with cats or impugning your organisational skills. And I figured it would be crueller to fake an imaginary cat and then have to rescind it, than just go for the insult.”
Jon blinked for a moment and then considered the matter.
“That’s … actually very considerate.”
“You know, I think I am, mostly? That’s something which seems to go all the way down. One of the better parts of me.”
Martin had been somewhat distant himself, for most of the day: likely due to processing the effects of watching himself unfold through time. Jon wondered what would have the greatest impact - seeing yourself clearly, completely and without the fog of forgetting and self-justification; or feeling yourself become merged in another, with all your edges fuzzy and mutable.
He was curious enough to actually ask, before he could wonder whether or not that was insensitive. ‘Hey, you just went through some serious emotional trauma, could I hit you with some follow up questions?’
But Martin seemed to be okay with it, picking his way through the whole experience with a mixture of confusion, interest, humour and occasional sore spots, which they carefully backed away from. Sasha joined in at some point (with Tim close beside her, supportive, but not smothering); and she and Martin trawled through their pasts together and poked at the oddities, like a small child turning over a jellyfish with a stick.
Sasha, especially, seemed to come more completely back to herself in the process, her growing curiosity and fascination outweighing the emotional effects of being ripped apart and inexpertly jammed back together.
“I hadn’t quite realised how much of myself I’d forgotten, or was remembering wrong. I mean, I’ve always known that most people didn’t really know me, that they were looking through the lens of their own expectations and assumptions. I just wasn’t aware that I did that too. That the me I always thought I was, didn’t really exist.”
Martin hummed a partial agreement.
“I think, for me, that’s more of a relief than anything. I mean, I certainly didn’t like everything about past me, but … I think I’d always been too harsh on him before? Borrowed my m … other people’s spectacles, to see myself through.”
Tim paused in his concerned/besotted gazing at Sasha, to give Jon one of those looks that were clearly intended to be meaningful, except that Jon had no idea what specific meaning was intended to be conveyed. It seemed best to ignore it, therefore.
Tim sighed at him, and gave everyone a slightly more careful and searching look, noting down every line of strain and badly hidden weariness, before briskly shrugging on what Jon had started to think of as his ‘Older Brother’ mode, with its mix of protectiveness and cheerful bullying.
“Okay, that feels like enough existential crisis for one day. So, what’s it to be, board game marathon or movie marathon? And, no, Jon, there’s no secret third option. You’re not getting out of having fun.”
“Am I allowed to disagree with your definition of fun?”
“Absolutely not!”
Jon glowered just a little, for form’s sake, but his heart wasn’t in it. And, when he fell asleep partway through the first film and woke up with Sasha teasing him happily, and Martin wrapped around him once again - so natural and comfortable that Jon almost didn’t notice - and with not a trace of resentment or blame, on either side, for Jon’s knowing more of them than they had freely given, he felt something settle around him like bedrock.
As if he was actually meant to be here, and doing something right, instead of feeling like some hastily shoved-in and unwanted substitute, scrambling miserably through something he didn’t understand.
Nothing had really changed, not in any obvious sense, and yet the future felt a little more promising, somehow, and less like yet another layer of imminent rubble to bury him in.
He leaned into Martin’s warmth and found that he was smiling.
~~~
On their first anniversary, Martin bought Jon a battered fedora, with no further comment.
It was never worn, obviously (well, except just the once and if there was photographic evidence, no there wasn’t). But the thought was … appreciated.