14 for jon/elias?
14. Anything they both dread?
Elias is working on some correspondence when he feels it: a little pulse of fear at the back of his throat, where he keeps his awareness of Jon. He sets his pen down and settles back in his chair.
He s very familiar with the gradients of Jon’s fear by now; has learned to relish the subtle nuances between his horror, his terror, his agitation and his panic. He loves Jon’s fear.
He opens the nearest pair to Jon’s current location: on the cover of a mystery novel, lying on the cot in Document Storage. He looks at Jon.
Jon is sitting up in the cot, knees folded against his chest, and he is trembling. He looks terrible, gaunt and despairing. Elias savors it, the sight of his hollow-eyed Archivist shaking with hunger: Jon is very close to his breaking point. When he does break–when the limits of his body drive him to take what he needs from the people he cares about–he’ll be ready.
Jon laughs hollowly, and looks directly at the book, meeting Elias’s gaze. Elias thrills a little: Jon doesn’t always know when he’s watching, but he’s getting better at being able to tell.
“I thought I’d be pleased to spite you at least,” Jon says hoarsely, and then flinches a little, like speaking aloud cost him something. “I thought–but it turns out knowing I’m doing the right thing doesn’t make it any easier.”
Back in the prison, Elias frowns.
With another pained laugh, Jon shifts on the cot, and Elias sees the chain looped around his wrist, binding him not to the cot but to the exposed pipe just behind it, running down the wall. The chain glimmers with little threads of spiderspilk where it catches the light.
Elias feels, for the first time in at least a year, a throb of something approaching real dread himself.
“That’s right,” Jon says, and he’s shivering again. “Dug it up in Artifact Storage. It’ll bind even me. Stop me from–” For an instant his teeth are chattering too hard to speak– “From hurting anyone else. From doing what it wants from me. What you want from me.” Jon scrubs both hands over his face with a light clink of chain, and then continues, low and desperate: “I’m not as strong as Daisy, you see. I can’t–make myself give it up. Couldn’t even take out my eyes, could I? Not now. But I can–I can still die, I think. I’m. Going to die. I think.”
Elias closes his eyes abruptly, and opens the nearest pair to Basira: a photograph of Daisy on the lockscreen on her phone. She’s wearing a key on the chain around her throat, and it’s gleaming with web.
This is unacceptable. It is unacceptable that he missed this: they must have been planning this for a while, must have learned some of Gertrude’s tricks.
He has to call Peter. He closes his eyes, tries to open Elias Bouchard’s eyes, back in the prison, but–
“Elias,” Jon whispers, and fear is a solid knot at the back of his throat, and Elias can’t help but look at him again. Jon has the book in his hands now, his eyes gleaming bright with fever, his lips chapped, his voice low and confessional. “Elias, you–told me I wouldn’t become a thing like–the corpse in Alexandria. I’m–Elias–am I going to die? Or am I going to–” he breaks off, unable to finish, but he keeps looking at Elias, his eyes dark and searching. “Helen told me that Beholding hasn’t changed me,” he says after a while. “Because I keep giving it what it wants. What happens when that changes?”
Elias doesn’t want to find out.
Elias doesn’t want to lose this chance, lose Jon, the way he lost Gertrude and so many others before her. He can’t.
He wants to tell Jon that he won’t allow it, but unfortunately he doesn’t quite have the means, not yet. Instead he reaches up a hand to his own throat and strokes at it lightly, until the dread starts to ebb away a little, dissolved not by any real reassurance but by the idea of reassurance itself. Jon gives a little shuddering sigh, the knot of his fear unraveled a little, and closes his eyes.
So does Elias, opening them again in his body.
He finds that he’s trembling, very finely, in every limb. He forces himself still, and calls for Denise the guard, pleasant and calm.
It is past time, he thinks, to change the game. Before Jon does something they’ll both regret.