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ollieofthebeholder · 3 years

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leaves too high to touch (roots too strong to fall): a TMA fanfic

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Chapter 47: Jon Prime

Jon awoke abruptly from a sound sleep and sat up before he thought about it. Martin mumbled something and shifted against him, but didn’t otherwise stir. Jon bent over to kiss his temple in wordless apology, then carefully extricated himself from his fiancé’s arms, picked up the torch, and moved silently over to the door. Something had roused him, he didn’t know what, but he’d be damned if he let it get to Martin. Clicking the torch off so as not to alert whoever or whatever might be out there, he put a hand on the knob, counted silently to three, and yanked the door open.

The first thing he registered was the beam of light playing on the wall opposite. The second thing was the person holding it. “Melanie?”

Melanie swung around and accidentally—or at least Jon presumed it was an accident—shone the torch directly in Jon’s eyes. He yelped and tried to protect his eyes. “Oh, God, sorry, sorry!”

“Jon?” Martin’s voice from behind him was worried, even through the fuzzy half-awake

“It’s all right, Martin. It’s Melanie.” Jon barely managed to keep from saying it’s only Melanie, which would have been a sure way to infuriate her. “It’s safe. Go back to sleep.”

“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” Melanie said. She actually sounded like she meant it. “I didn’t—know you were still out. It’s almost lunchtime.”

Jon stepped out of the little room and closed the door behind him, hoping Martin would be able to get back to sleep. They’d had a rough night, for reasons he really ought to tell Martin but hadn’t admitted yet, and he needed his rest. “We’re living underground, Melanie. And most of what we do aboveground we have to after hours, to keep hidden. We keep a bit of odd hours. It’s fine. Is something wrong?”

“No, not really. If I’d known you were still asleep, I’d probably have tried to wait.” Melanie waved what was in her off hand at him, and Jon’s eyes locked onto it. A statement, and from the sharp hunger that lanced through him, a real one. “It’s just—they’re all trying to restrict themselves to one statement a week, you know? Martin told me he and Tim talked to Jon last night, and he’s getting too dependent on the statements. Like, he went too long without one and got really sick.”

Jon sighed heavily. “I was afraid of that. I really thought they were monitoring things better…and I’m sure it wasn’t this bad this quickly for me.”

“Yeah, well, apparently Snoop God doesn’t think patience is a virtue. Anyway, he’s all right now, but nobody else wants to get that bad, so they’re trying to…”

“Restrict their caloric intake?”

“Basically, yeah.” Melanie smirked at him, but the smile faded almost instantly. “Sasha took a statement live last week before she went home for the week. Tim took one on Thursday. Martin took Georgie’s last week and recorded another real one yesterday. Then we found this one today.” She hesitated. “I was going to read it, but everyone’s…pretty unanimous that I shouldn’t.”

“They’re right. As soon as you start reading them aloud—I mean, just reading them to yourself, just working on them, is going to be bad enough, but reading them aloud will just tie you more and more to the Eye.” Jon cocked his head at Melanie. “So what are you doing down here? Trying to sneak past and read it with no one knowing?”

“No,” Melanie said indignantly. “I was bringing it to you. I mean, if Jon gets sick going too long without reading one, you must need them, too. And if we leave it lying around loose up there, someone who shouldn’t is going to not be able to resist temptation. So, two birds, one stone, all that. I just figured it would help.”

“Oh,” Jon said, a bit surprised. “Thank you. I—I have been a bit…I do need one. Thank you.”

“Do you need a recorder or anything?” Melanie asked, handing over the statement. “Or do you just…speak into the void?”

Jon couldn’t help but laugh. “Sometimes, yes, I do. I’ll be fine. If whatever is behind the recorders feels it’s important, one will…appear. Otherwise I’ll consume the statement and hand it back, and from what I understand, the next person to actually try and make a recording of it will be able to record it without issue.”

Melanie eyeballed him. “How many times has it happened that you got one and the recorder didn’t appear?”

“Hasn’t yet,” Jon admitted. “Thank you, Melanie.”

“Sure. See you next time you pop out. Tell your Martin I’m sorry I woke him.” Melanie gave him a sardonic salute and made her way back to the steps.

Jon watched her go, then turned to go back into the room he and Martin had claimed as their own and hesitated. Martin had always hated listening to him do the statements, and Jon frankly had always hated doing them in front of other people. Now that he knew that the presence of another person—especially someone Eye-aligned—meant the energy was shared out, it explained a lot more. Normally he waited until after hours, went up into the Archives, and did whatever statements they left for him in the Archivist’s office, but something under his skin itched and he didn’t want to wait.

He told himself he was just being courteous, that he was just letting Martin get his rest by going to another room to read this one out. He knew himself well enough, though, to know he was lying.

He slipped further down the tunnels, looking for another of the rooms his counterpart had marked as being an actual room. There were plenty, but he ignored most of them. The one he eventually chose was outwardly no different from any of the others, but it was closer to one of the other exits from the tunnels.

That, Jon had no idea why it was so important.

He slipped into the room, settled down on the floor, and set the torch next to him. With practice, he’d learned to balance it so that it formed a sort of lantern effect; it wasn’t optimal, but it was enough to let him read if he needed to. In its light, he set the folder down and began to open it.

The whirring caught his attention, and Jon looked around. A tape recorder sat just outside the circle of torchlight. Sighing, he grabbed it, checked that it was recording and not playing, and brought it to the familiar position.

“Statement of Anya Villette,” he began, “regarding a cleaning job on Hill Top Road.”

Jon had said once that, as a child, he had hated to read anything he felt he had read before. The first time the team had given him a statement to record—or more accurately to re-record—he had worried that he would feel similarly about the statements, that they wouldn’t satisfy him because he knew them already. He’d quickly learned that he needn’t have worried; while he remembered them, they were relatively new to the Eye, and he usually didn’t realize he remembered them until he was done recording. This time was no different. The name ticked at his mind when he first read it, but once he uttered those words—statement begins—he was lost to the real world. All that existed was him, the statement, and the Eye peering over his shoulder and drinking the fear through him like the lid of a toddler’s spillproof cup. The only difference was that, maybe because he was in the tunnels and the Eye had to strain, he was aware of something else paying attention to him. Likely whatever was behind the recorders.

“Statement ends,” he said finally, lowering the last page to his lap. For a moment, he stared blankly ahead of him at the wall opposite, the statement settling into the nooks and crannies of his mind.

Hill Top Road. He remembered this statement now, of course he did. Martin had been the one to find it for him prior to the Unknowing. He still remembered the apologetic look on his face as he told him I couldn’t find anything new on circuses, but I know the Hill Top Road stuff interests you too and I thought, well, it might be something. Jon had wanted to hug him for that something awful, but he’d restricted himself to a warm smile and a thank you, Martin that had made Martin’s ears go pink.

“Supplemental,” he said at last. “I…I still have no idea what to make of this one, to be honest. I know that if we do additional research, we will come up with nothing, even more than usual. Anya Villette does not exist. The cleaning agency she purports to work for does exist, but does not employ her and has not been contracted to clean the house at Hill Top Road. That house is certainly not student housing; it’s been abandoned for God knows how long. And”—he sighed heavily—“if I go there, I will only find a tape playing a statement recorded long ago and a new one on official Institute forms.”

Or would he?

Jon froze and turned the question over in his mind. He’d never been clear how the Web even knew he was going to go to Hill Top Road when he went. The sly wording of her statement indicated that it had likely been written while he was on his way there, so it wasn’t as though it had been sitting around for years waiting for him, and the point the tape had been at likely meant she’d set her trap just prior to their entrance. He had no idea how the Web had monitored him, if the Web had monitored him, but if it had been, it was probably monitoring Past Jon now. It likely didn’t know about him. Whatever was at Hill Top Road, whatever Annabelle Cane had warned him away from in his own time, she might not know to warn him now.

“Regardless,” he said slowly, “for the good of…everyone I care about, I think it is important that I do go to Hill Top Road. The sooner, the better.” He swallowed. “End recording.”

He turned off the tape recorder and got to his feet, recorder in one hand and statement in the other. The correct thing to do would be to take this back to his and Martin’s room, curl up with Martin for a bit longer, and then put the statement and tape on the Archivist’s desk. And God, he wanted to. If he was really going to Hill Top Road, going alone would probably be the stupidest thing he could do.

At the same time…

He’d felt very strongly at the time that he recorded this statement the first time that he ought to stay away from the house at Hill Top Road. He felt that way now. The only other time he’d felt this strongly that he needed to stay away from something, that there was something the Eye didn’t want him to know, it had been when he’d first listened to the tape of Gertrude Robinson’s talk with Eric Delano.

And if the Eye didn’t want him to know something, it was probably something that would be to its detriment. Which could only help their plan to stop Jonah Magnus and his damned…ritual.

He stared down at the objects in his hands, then set them neatly on the floor next to the door, picked up the torch, and headed for the exit from the tunnels.

Fortunately, there was no one about to see him emerge from the service entrance in the South Kensington station. Nor did anyone look twice at him as he paid his fare and got on the train. It was almost a two-hour journey from there to the house at Hill Top Road—two hours to worry about what he would find, two hours to fret about doing this alone, two hours to reproach himself for not waking Martin to tell him where he was going. Two hours to decide to turn back.

He didn’t.

Two hours later, he stood in front of the house at Hill Top Road and stared up at it. It was exactly as he remembered it: brand new, relatively modest, well-appointed, and totally abandoned. Nobody had lived in this house for years. Nobody would live in this house, ever, if Jon had to make a guess. It wasn’t even owned by anyone.

Breaking into it was a lot easier than it had been the first time. In the first place, he knew the house now, knew its weak points and easy access spots. In the second place, he was alone rather than being burdened with an angry ex-cop who thought every problem could be solved with a combination of obstinate logic and a certain amount of pressure, an even angrier ex-Internet celebrity who thought that both he and the entire idea of trying to hunt down Annabelle Cane was stupid, and a Hunter who knew that every step she took into the building, no matter how good her intentions, made it that much harder for her to stop listening to the blood. (He also didn’t have to contend with the other three all assuming he was too staid and weedy to know how to gain access to someplace he wasn’t wanted, like he’d never done a spot of breaking and entering in his life. Georgie had once accused him of being a cat with opposable thumbs and social anxiety.) In a way, he wished he had Daisy with him—she’d been something of a comfort at the time, which was a bit of a surprise—but at the same time, he had to acknowledge that the Daisy he missed was the one he’d rescued from the Buried, not the one who’d threatened his and Martin’s life seven months ago.

Jesus, had it only been seven months?

Shaking his head, Jon slid the bobby pin he’d found on the Tube out of his pocket, picked the lock on the back door in a matter of seconds (not his best time, but he was out of practice), and slipped inside. He took another deep breath, then coughed as that drew dust and…other things he’d prefer not to think about into his lungs. Once he had himself under control, he turned and swept the beam of his torchlight around the place.

The interior, like the exterior, was exactly like he remembered it. Cobwebs covered virtually every surface, far more than should have built up even in nine years of disuse, clinging to curtain rods and disused furniture and empty cabinets. Jon swallowed against the sudden rise of nausea at the reminder of the Web’s presence. He tried to remind himself of what Martin had told him once, when they’d first been at the safe house and he’d seen the cobwebs in the corner and almost gone feral—that cobwebs were old and abandoned webs full of dust, that the presence of them meant that the spiders themselves were long gone.

Somehow, though, he didn’t think they were. Not completely.

Careful not to breathe too deeply, Jon moved cautiously into the house. Obviously it wasn’t the same house Agnes Montague had grown up in, but he had a fairly good idea of the place from the statements. Anya Villette had described a cupboard under the stairs that led to an unmarked basement. Daisy had claimed not to have noticed one, but…

Something creaked overhead. Jon froze, hand on a door that seemed likely to lead downward. The house was empty, he was sure of that, there shouldn’t be—

The creak came again, like someone was moving around. There was definitely someone upstairs. Jon’s curiosity overcame his caution, what little of it he had left. It wasn’t compulsion from the Eye. The Eye very much wanted him to leave. Any desire to see what was upstairs was one hundred percent Jon, and it was that that drove him to investigate. It was nice to want to know something without needing to Know it. Gripping the torch like a weapon, he started up the stairs.

It was a spiral staircase, something he hadn’t noticed the first time he was there. Something ticked at the back of his brain, something about a parlor up a spiral stair, but he couldn’t quite remember. As he hit the top step, though, the knowledge slammed into his brain.

“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly, “’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy; The way into my parlour is up a winding stair, And I have many curious things to shew when you are there.”

“The Spider and the Fly,” by Mary Howitt. First published in 1829. Meant to be a moral lesson about the dangers of flattery and falling for seductive words and a silver tongue. It had been the second poem Martin ever memorized, after his Year Two teacher reduced him to tears by lecturing him in front of the entire class for “showing off” by learning—

Jon quickly shut the mental door against the flood of knowledge. Martin and Past Martin might be different people now, but they’d had the same experiences—up to a point—and he owed them both the courtesy of staying out of their heads. He had enough knowledge to be getting on with. He was about to walk into the Web’s cunningly-laid trap.

For just a second, he hesitated. There was still time to turn back…but he’d come this far. He couldn’t very well take a four-hour journey, undoubtedly worry Martin, and then go back and say it was pointless. He might as well learn something.

There was a door opposite him, slightly ajar. He took a slow, steadying breath, resolutely shored up his mind to keep out the Beholder, and opened it.

It was a bedroom, simply furnished, as if for a little girl. There was a four-poster bed with carved columns, a low dresser, and a vanity and mirror, all painted white. The seat of the chair in front of the vanity, the comforter and bedskirt, and the ruffled canopy on the bed were all a delicate shade of pink, or had been before the dust settled on them. And sitting on the top of the bed, leaning back against the headboard and playing with something in her hands, was a woman Jon knew far better than he wanted to.

“Hello, Jon,” she said pleasantly. “Do you mind if I call you Jon?”

Jon exhaled heavily. “Annabelle Cane. Why am I surprised?”

Annabelle sat up, cross-legged on the bed, a sly smile on her lips. “You’re looking well. I’m so glad you came to visit.”

“Really,” Jon said flatly. He almost called her out for not having wanted to see him before, but he held his tongue. She couldn’t know he was from the future. He still wasn’t sure what the Web wanted, or what Annabelle herself had wanted, but he wouldn’t risk the world by tipping his hand.

“But of course! The Mother of Puppets has watched you very closely.” Annabelle tugged her hands apart, and Jon realized what it was—a length of some kind of string, looped around her fingers and forming a sort of open shape reminiscent of a teacup. It didn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to guess it was made of spiderweb.

“So what does the Web want with me?” Jon crossed his arms over his chest, which would have been a lot more effective if he hadn’t almost clobbered himself in the jaw with the torch.

“Oh, I can’t tell you that.” Annabelle passed a few loops from finger to finger, pinched in a couple of places, twisted, and spread her hands again; now instead of a cup and saucer, it looked a bit like a witch’s broom. “That’s not why you’re here, anyway.”

Jon stubbornly remained in the doorway. As long as he didn’t cross the threshold, he’d be fine. Probably. Maybe. “And why am I here?”

Seemingly uninterested, Annabelle brought her hands back together and began shifting the loops again. “Have you ever played this game before?”

“What game? The Web’s game?”

“No, silly.” Annabelle held up her hands, revealing a latticework like a suspension bridge. “It’s called Cat’s Cradle. More often played with two, of course, but you can play by yourself if you want. Did you never play it?”

“No,” Jon said, and it was only partially a lie. He’d never known there was a name for it, or a formal method of playing, but he’d once done something similar with a bit of yarn he’d found in his desk. It had distracted him enough that he’d failed to pay proper attention in class, and his teacher had first yelled at him for not answering her question and then for playing with the string, scolding him that he would cut his fingers off if he wasn’t careful. He hadn’t exactly believed her, but he’d also never tried again.

“Shame. It’s a pleasant way to pass the time.” Annabelle began working the loops again. “Why are you here? Because you’re curious. Because you want—no, because you need to know.” She looked up at him. “Because you need my help.”

“Your help?” Jon said incredulously. “Your help with what?”

“Your plan. Gertrude had one, too, you know. So many people have plans. And those plans depend on so many things, so many little strands woven together. It’s almost like—” Annabelle spread her hands apart again, fingers splayed wide. In the center of the span was a perfect eight-pointed shape. “—a spider’s web.”

Jon stood his ground, with difficulty. “So you know what my plan is.”

Annabelle’s eyes glittered. “I know what your goal is. Not how you plan to do it. Not necessarily. The Web isn’t like the Eye. It doesn’t Know. It just sees…patterns.” Another twist of her hands, another slip of a loop, and suddenly she was seeming to transform her hand into a marionette, or else creating the framework of a hut. “And I see the pattern of a goal, and the threads that could lead to it. Do you think you have the power to succeed?”

“Yes,” Jon replied immediately. “We do?”

“We?” Annabelle looked up at him with a smile.

Jon narrowed his eyes. “Not you.”

“Oh, no, of course not me. No, you’re talking about Martin, aren’t you?” Annabelle’s smile broadened. “Of course. You can’t hope to succeed without him.”

Jon froze. Fear lanced through him. She couldn’t know, she couldn’t possibly know…he’d been watching, he knew his counterpart and Martin’s weren’t together yet. Patterns or no patterns, she couldn’t know what he meant to him.

In a low, dangerous voice, he said, “Don’t you touch him. Don’t you dare touch him.”

“Perish the thought! I want you to succeed, Jon. I want to help you. I can help you.” Annabelle held out the string towards him. It just looked like a mess. “Take this.”

“So you can bind me in the Web? Not a chance.” Jon reached for the door handle. “I never should have come here.”

“It’s not a trap. Martin can’t give you help as it is.” Annabelle’s voice stopped Jon in his tracks. “Not if you can’t find him.”

Slowly, Jon drew himself up to his full height. “What. Do. You. Mean.”

Annabelle was still holding out the strings in his direction. “It’s not a threat, either. Patterns, Jon.” She drew her hands back, slipped one of the loops quickly off a finger, and stretched them wide, producing a tangled mess. “One slipped thread can throw them all off. And if it breaks…well.” Dropping all the loops from her fingers, she began quickly and deftly unpicking the knots, talking all the while. “You have a bond. It needs to be…stronger. Otherwise there’s a risk of neither of you surviving what you intend to do. It will protect you as well as him.”

Jon watched as she began looping the strings over her fingers again. “And if I refuse?”

“Then you refuse. You walk out of this house, we go our separate ways, and you hope your plan succeeds without that bond.” Annabelle shrugged. “It won’t hurt you. It won’t hurt Martin.”

“It hurt Gertrude.”

“Gertrude did it herself. And she also was bonding with the Desolation. How could that be anything but painful?” Annabelle pointed out. “But I know how to weave the threads. It’s a perfectly harmless bond. It will just give you both the strength and power you need to survive what’s coming.” She spread her hands again. Somehow, she managed to pinch and twist the strings just right so that there was a clear and obvious M in the middle of it. M for Martin. A few more flicks of the fingers, and then she was stretching her hands out to Jon again. “Do you trust me? Then take the strings.”

Jon hesitated. Did he trust Annabelle Cane? The simple answer was no; she was of the Web, the entity he’d feared the longest. He knew now that none of the entities had humanity’s best interests at heart, but some were worse than others. Was the Web better or worse than the Eye? Than the Hunt? Than the End? And for that matter…was this Annabelle acting on behalf of the Web, or acting on her own?

The other issue was this bond. Could Jon really make this decision for Martin, bind them together, without asking? Martin may have liked spiders once, but he trusted Annabelle Cane and the Web even less than Jon did. He genuinely worried about its manipulations, about the possibility of it controlling either of them. And Jon had no right to make decisions for him. They were a team, they had to decide together…

The problem was that, like attacking Jonah, this was a now or never situation. Jon had to make a decision, and he had to make it immediately. If he walked away, he would never get this offer again. He had to choose between accepting the bond and hoping Martin would forgive him for it, or rejecting it and hoping he survived for Martin to scold him. He had to decide whether he believed he was strong enough on his own to protect the ones he loved, or whether he would need Martin’s strength. He had to decide whether or not this would bind him to his Martin or to Past Martin, or if it would bind Past Jon and Past Martin together, or if he even believed Annabelle would actually do it.

But if it would protect the man he loved…

Jon came to a decision. He stepped all the way into the room, stretched his hands out, and let Annabelle transfer the strings onto his fingers.

“Good,” Annabelle said, sounding satisfied. “Quickly, there’s not much time.” Her hands were a blur as she moved loops and threads from finger to finger. The string bit into the scar on his hand, but Jon gritted his teeth and bore it up. Finally, she clapped her hands. “Now then…pull.”

Jon separated his hands to the furthest extent the string would let him, and the world seemed to explode in a swirl of static.

#ollie writes fanfic #leaves too high to touch (roots too strong to fall)#tma #the magnus archives #jonmartin #annabelle cane #canon-typical web content

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