There’s a long silence after the door shuts behind Jon Prime. Sasha stares at Martin Prime for a long moment, several possible things to say next running through her head. How did we actually die wars with how much of that really happened and a slight humorous side trip into I don’t think I’ll ever wear this shirt again, because of course she’s wearing her favorite shirt today, as well as what words did Jon say in that memory and if he was in the other fourteen why did you talk like it was an unknown subject.
What actually comes out of her mouth at last is, “Wickie?”
Martin Prime sighs heavily. “It’s…an old name for a lighthouse keeper. Comes from trimming the wicks to keep the light burning.”
“M-my—” Martin rubs his temples hard, almost like he’s trying to manually turn the wheels in his brain. “Dad used to call…us that. I’d forgotten…” He looks up at Martin Prime, and Sasha is a little taken aback at the anguish in his eyes. “Is—was it a coincidence or—?”
“No. The Keeper is…he’s part of the Lonely, and maybe a little of the Spiral. The loneliness of distance. Not just being separated from someone you care about, but the specific loneliness that comes when you know exactly where they are but can’t get to them, either because there’s a physical barrier or because you just…can’t. The fear that if you reach out to them, they won’t reach back.” Martin Prime closes his eyes for a brief moment. “So the Keeper just…knows those sorts of nicknames. A name given to you by someone you miss…or someone who misses you. Someone you can’t reach, anyway. In this case, though…he knew it because he is the one who gave it.”
Tim’s eyes widen. “Wait, seriously? Does that mean you’re—”
“He made a deal to keep me—us—safe,” Martin Prime interrupts. “It’s why he left in the first place. I can tell you the story some other time, but…maybe not today?”
“No,” Martin agrees in a very small voice. “Not today.”
Tim drapes his arm around Martin’s shoulders and nods. Sasha is more inclined to press, but she swallows down on the urge. Curiosity is all well and good, but she shouldn’t sate it at the expense of her friends, so if they say no to a topic, she’s going to respect that. For now, anyway. Time to pick one of the other avenues of discussion.
She wants to ask about the pictures, get more details about what came before those moments, but something tells her that’s a discussion that needs to happen with the Jons in the room. Also, that’s going to hurt Tim, probably, so she starts running through her other options, looking for the least volatile one.
Tim beats her to it, which is probably a good thing. “So that was the first time…your Jon found out about all that? You didn’t, like, give him a taste last night?”
“No. That…I knew he’d need it. Like I said, he hasn’t had a statement since he got back. Sitting in on your—our, I guess—statements from last night…all that did was take the edge off of things. I knew what I went through was big enough that it’ll keep him going for a bit.”
“Right, but why not at least lay the groundwork? Warn him that it was going to be…bad?”
Martin Prime hesitates, turning in the direction of the door briefly before saying in a low voice, “He can’t always…the hungrier he gets for a statement, the harder it is for him to control himself. The last few months before the world ended? I found out, sort of by accident, that he’d been going out and…pouncing random people for their statements. One of them complained to the Institute and I had to stage an intervention. He’s doing better about it, but I didn’t want to risk tempting him. He’d never forgive himself.”
“For falling off the wagon?” Sasha cocks her head.
Martin Prime turns to look at her, and really, it’s a little unnerving now that she knows he’s blind. It explains why he always looks like he’s looking through her, but it’s still creepy. “It’s a lot more painful when he takes a statement by force. Even if I was going to offer it to him anyway, if he…pounced on it like that, it’d be more intense. He hates it enough when it’s strangers, but if it’s—someone he knows…” He trails off.
“Will that happen to our Jon?” Martin asks. His voice shakes a little when he asks. Sasha wonders how much of that is residual from hearing Martin Prime’s statement and how much of it is actually about Jon.
Martin Prime doesn’t answer for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he says at last. “Probably not so quickly, anyway. Gertrude Robinson…I don’t know if she just never got as bad or if she just could control it better. You can ask Jon later.”
“He won’t pass out if we do, will he?” Tim glances towards the door. Sasha suppresses a smile at the obvious concern on his face. Honestly, Tim fusses just as much as Martin does at times. He’s the consummate big brother, while Martin is something of a mother hen.
“No. What just happened was…he pushed too hard, against the wrong subject. He can’t Know what’s going on inside the Eye. Really, trying to Know anything about any of the entities directly is beyond him, and he knows that.” Martin Prime’s voice sharpens into censure for a moment before he visibly forces himself to relax. “Usually he’s pretty good at knowing his limits.”
“So why did he do that?” Tim asks. “If he knew it would hurt him, why would he push? He’s not that…masochistic usually. That’s your job.”
“Hey,” Martin mumbles, but without any real heat behind it.
“He’s not wrong,” Sasha points out. She’s watched Martin push himself, break himself into smaller and smaller pieces, trying to be what everyone needs him to be, always putting everyone else first.
“I think part of it is that it was something he genuinely wanted to know the answer to,” Martin Prime says. “We’ve never known for sure how much the Beholding can see on its own and how much it needs its…agents to give it. It for sure can watch us at the Institute, but in a very real way, the Institute is part of the Beholding, or vice versa. Honestly, it’s not something we think about much. But knowing Jon, once he had the question in his mind, he had to see if he could find out the answer to it, despite knowing it was a dangerous idea. Part of it might have been that he was so tired, too. The longer he goes without a statement, the worse his decision-making skills get.”
“Oh, brilliant. They’re so amazing most of the time,” Tim drawls. “God knows Jon never makes poor life choices.”
Martin Prime actually laughs. “I mean, not like we can throw stones here.”
Tim laughs, too, and Martin manages a smile. Sasha wants to ask if Martin Prime considers her one of Tim’s “poor life choices” or if he even knows they slept together, but just in case he doesn’t, she doesn’t want to drag that out into the open just now. Again, she’s fond of unearthing others’ secrets, but very close-mouthed about her own; it’s probably unfair, but there you are. Lest Tim bring it up, she starts looking for the next thread to pull on.
“That was Jon, right?” she asks at last. “In the…last gallery you were talking about. Those pictures. They were all of Jon?”
That fast, Martin Prime’s smile disappears. “Yeah. Most of them haven’t happened…obviously. And one of them for sure won’t now.”
“The third one,” Sasha guesses. “That was—when Jane Prentiss attacked you all?”
Martin Prime nods. “It was the middle of the day. Jon’s the one that accidentally went through the wall—there was a spider he was trying to take out—”
“The Web toying with him?” Martin asks. He sounds a little calmer than before, but still shaken.
“Honestly, I’ve never been altogether sure about that. It might’ve actually just been a spider, but…the balance of probability is on it being the Web, yes. Anyway, Jon accidentally broke the wall, the worms got in—our Sasha and I ended up having to drag him into that storage room, but he’d already been bitten a few times, he couldn’t walk. Our Tim was at lunch at the time, he came back and—Sasha went out to save him, they got separated, and Tim wound up in the walls. He came through the wall in that storage room and convinced Jon and me to come out with him. We got separated in the tunnels, just like you all did, but Tim and Jon found the trap door and I, well, I found Gertrude. Eventually. But yeah, when Jon and Tim came out in the Archives, Jane Prentiss was there and she attacked them. They were pretty bad off before…Elias finally set off the CO2 system.”
Tim looks down at his hands—or more accurately, Sasha realizes, at one of his hands, since his other arm is still draped around Martin’s shoulders. She wonders if it’s to comfort Martin or to reassure himself. “Are we lucky, then?”
“Yes,” Martin mutters. “Extremely.”
“You’re lucky, too,” Martin Prime says. “Trust me. It wasn’t…Jon’s right, just because I didn’t come away with physical scars doesn’t mean I got off unhurt. And that was when things started going bad for us all.”
“So how do we stop the rest?” Sasha asks. “Are you all going to tell us what happened so we can avoid it?”
“Yes, I think so, but I’d really like to only have to go over it once?” Martin Prime glances in the direction of the door again. “And most of them I wasn’t there for. He’s told me about them, but…I wasn’t there.”
“But what were they?” Sasha persists. “Just how he got hurt? How he got the scars?”
Martin Prime takes a deep breath and curls his hands into tight fists. “Broadly, yes, they’re how he was scarred. They’re…they were the encounters with the Fears that marked him.”
Sasha tilts her head to one side. “Like what Michael said about you—that you’d been marked?”
Martin Prime nods. “To be marked by a Fear is to feel it, all the way through to your soul. Sometimes it’s physical, sometimes not. Mine aren’t…at least, not really.” He runs a hand through his hair, seemingly without noticing. It’s the first time Sasha realizes how much grey is streaked through his curls.
Martin swallows audibly. “How…how many fears have marked you?”
“Four, I think. Three for sure. I’m not altogether sure about whether or not the Stranger actually marked me or not.” Martin Prime tilts his head to one side. “You’ve only been marked by two, though, and…I never got the mark of the Corruption. My others were the Lonely and the Spiral, and of course the Beholding.”
“What about us?” Sasha asks. “In your timeline, I mean. How many were we marked by?”
Martin Prime hesitates. “Tim…I think he was four as well. The Beholding, obviously, we were all marked by that one as soon as we set foot in the Archives. At least I—I think that’s how that worked. Or at least as soon as we put our voices on those tapes. Then the Corruption—Jane Prentiss’ attack—and he was with me when I got tricked into entering the Spiral’s domain, so it marked him too. And I’m pretty sure he was marked by the Stranger. I can’t say when, but I’m fairly sure he had been.”
Sasha waits, then prompts, “And me?”
Martin Prime takes a deep breath. “I honestly don’t know, Sasha. If I had to guess, I’d say two. Three at most, but I don’t know if your encounter with Michael really counts as a mark. Honestly, I wouldn’t have known the Corruption had actually marked you if you hadn’t mentioned that you could hear the worms singing.”
Sasha huffs. “I’m not sure what surprises me more—that I didn’t get more marks, or that you didn’t.”
“I spent more time at the Institute than I did actually tracking things down,” Martin Prime replies. “Someone had to keep the Archives running properly, and, well, that fell on me. Our Tim was…he had a project of his own he was focusing on.”
“And me?” Sasha asks again.
Martin Prime looks in her direction for a long moment. His face is tight with pain. “You’re really going to make me say it,” he says flatly.
“Sash—” Tim begins.
“Yes,” Sasha says over whatever it is Tim’s going to protest. “Whatever reason I avoided all that…don’t I deserve to know?”
“You died, Sasha,” Martin Prime says sharply. “You didn’t get marked by more entities because you died. You were torn to pieces by a—a thing that took your place, replaced you in our memories so that we didn’t even know you were gone. We spent almost a year believing that it was you, and finding out that it wasn’t nearly destroyed all three of us. Worse was finding out that Elias knew all along and didn’t tell us because he wanted to see what it would do to Jon, and damn the effect on Tim or me.”
Okay. Sasha really should have known that. She heard him describe the painting, after all, she even thought about not wearing her favorite shirt again because of it. She knew she was dead, and Tim too; it’s obviously why they didn’t come back with Martin Prime and Jon Prime. But something in her wanted to hear Martin Prime say it out loud, and she’s not sure she likes what that says about her. She bites down hard on her tongue to keep from asking about Tim’s death. That’s not hers to ask, and she’s almost sure its going to be something the Jons need to be there for too.
After a moment of awkward silence, Tim gets up from the sofa. “I’m getting us all tea,” he says, his voice unusually subdued. “I think we’re going to need it.”
“Do you…need a hand?” Martin pushes himself to a standing position.
Tim looks like he’s going to refuse, then nods. “Sure, c’mon.”
Sasha watches them go. Martin is walking well enough, if a little stiffly, but Tim still hovers just behind him, not touching but there to catch him if he falls. It’s almost funny how flustered Martin gets when Tim looks after him, too. For a moment, Sasha is tempted to ask Martin Prime about that—if it’s Tim he has the crush on—but that feels a little bit like a betrayal of Martin, to take away his choice to tell her. And she’s still stinging a bit from the way Martin Prime flung the answer to her last question at her.
After a moment of silence, Martin Prime sighs heavily. “I’m sorry for saying it like that.”
“I shouldn’t have pushed,” Sasha replies. “Not like I didn’t know the answer. I—I don’t know why I had to make you say it when I knew I’d died during your attack on the Institute.”
“I’m beginning to see why Gertrude Robinson expected you’d be appointed Archivist after her. You’re…a lot like she was. That’s not necessarily an insult, mind, but that’s not necessarily a compliment either.”
From what Sasha remembers of Gertrude Robinson—which isn’t much—she can understand that. They sit in silence for a while, listening to the clattering of mugs from the kitchen, before she finally says, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure, but I reserve the right not to answer.”
“What’s it like? Being blind, I mean.”
Martin Prime tilts his head to one side. “Are you asking me in clinical terms or in more general ‘how does it feel’ terms?”
“Both?”
Martin Prime smiles, briefly. “Fair enough.” He pauses for a moment, as if considering his options. “In the strictly literal sense…it’s like being in a room with really thick blackout curtains over the window. Sometimes there are…textures, maybe, to the darkness? Only if there’s a really bright light. For the most part, though, it’s just…darkness.” He takes off his glasses and holds them out to Sasha. “Here, take a look.”
Curious, Sasha does. She holds Martin Prime’s glasses up to the light, then removes her own and slides on Martin Prime’s. The strength of the prescription knocks her backwards against the sofa and makes her head swim. She takes them off, blinking, and puts them back in Martin Prime’s outstretched hand. “In other words, you were basically blind before all this.”
“It’s just that the glasses don’t help anymore,” Martin Prime confirms. He settles them back on his face anyway, which Sasha understands. They’ve got to be a comfort. “Not being able to see…I can work with that. It’s just the added layer of there not even being blurry shapes in front of me, and, well, Mum was a light sleeper, so I kind of got used to moving carefully and without turning on any lights when I was growing up. Moving around I can do, although I’m sure you noticed me running into things a lot over the last couple weeks because I don’t know there’s a table or a stack of books between me and where I’m trying to get. But it’s…it’s disconcerting to not know if someone’s in the room, or be able to see what they’re doing when there’s a silence. I can’t read faces or see hand gestures. I can still tell when someone is looking at me, but I can’t tell who, or even what direction it’s coming from. And there’s—there’s so much I took for granted that I won’t ever see again. Tim’s smile, Jon’s eyes, the sunlight sparkling on the Thames, the moon rising over the city.” He’s silent for a moment. “I didn’t even remember what you looked like. The—the Not-Sasha? It looked different, it sounded different. It had to, because whenever it takes someone’s place, there’s always one or two people who—who remember the person as they were before, only no one believes them.”
“Which is how it feeds its patron’s fear,” Sasha guesses. “The Stranger?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Martin Prime nods. “I recognized your voice when I got back, only because we—we had a few recordings you were in from before. Your statement, your teasing Jon about the pronunciation of ‘calliope’, the recording Tim did on Jon’s birthday…a couple more you were on. But even having seen that—painting or whatever, I still couldn’t put a face to the voice. I only knew what you looked like in shadow and the most terrified you’d ever been in your life. I knew the Not-Sasha wasn’t what you looked like, but…I had to get Jon to describe you last night.”
Sasha glances in the direction of the kitchen, to make sure Tim and Martin aren’t coming back, but she hasn’t heard the kettle yet. “What did—it look like? The Not-Me? What did it make you think I looked like?”
“She—it—was…well, for starters, it was short. Petite, I think, is the right word. At least a head shorter than Jon and scrawny on top of it. Blonde hair in a shag cut, green eyes. No glasses.” Martin Prime pauses. “Only drank green tea.”
Sasha, who admittedly has a serious caffeine addiction, pulls a face. “How’d she drink it?”
“With cream,” Martin Prime answers. He takes a deep breath. “Don’t tell Jon, but…actually, there was a little part of me that was kind of relieved when we found out it wasn’t really, well, you. The first day we were back in the Archives after the attack, it was just the two of us, and…I made a cup of tea for both of us, we were both stressed out, so I thought it would help. I thought I made it like I always did, but…when I gave it to her, she took a sip, all but winced, and asked me if I’d made it for Jon or Tim. That’s when she ‘reminded’ me that she only drank green tea with cream. It—it threw me. Badly. I spent the next three months second-guessing myself at every turn, about the stupidest things, because if I could forget something like how one of my friends like their tea, what else was I forgetting? What else was I doing wrong?” He shakes his head. “Honestly, it was hard to shake that even after we knew it wasn’t our Sasha, but at least I could convince myself that there was no good reason for me to know how it would like tea. Even though, supposedly, it replaced all our memories of her—you—with the ones it wanted us to have.”
Sasha hears the unspoken question and considers leaving it, or forcing him to actually say it aloud, but honestly, she’s put him through enough already this morning. “I can’t stand green tea. I’m more one for coffee, actually, but when I do drink tea, it’s black with lots of sugar. Tim suggested once that you just heat up a cup of syrup and call it a day.”
Martin Prime’s face lights up at that. “I did remember it right then! Christ, thank you. You have no idea…it’s been eating away at me for ages. I know it’s ridiculous in the grand scheme of things, but…”
But a big part of Martin’s identity is wrapped up in his ability to care for others, and naturally thinking he got it wrong would set him atilt. “Why leave you that, though?” Sasha asks curiously. “If you couldn’t remember anything else about—me—why remember just how I like my tea?”
“Well…I mean, I worked with you every day, if I’d remembered all about you, I’d have gone to Jon straightaway, or—probably not to Elias, but maybe. I didn’t…know I shouldn’t trust him then. If I’d laid down Amy Patel’s statement in front of Jon and pointed out the parallels, there’s a chance he’d have believed me, which would’ve ruined everything for it. So the one person it chose to remember you as you really were was someone who didn’t see you every day, or at least didn’t work with you closely enough to be suspicious. And—” Martin Prime swallows. “Part of the Stranger is that fear that you—you don’t know someone as well as you ought to. So what better way to make me afraid than to make me doubt such a fundamental part of our interaction? I-I mean, it wasn’t human. It might not have liked tea at all. Maybe it just picked something at random that was so different from what you liked that it would throw me off-balance.”
Suddenly, Sasha gets it. “That’s why you said you might have been marked by the Stranger! You don’t think that counts? If it made you that…paranoid and afraid?”
“Maybe? It was worse for Jon. It made him so paranoid he thought one of us was trying to kill him, and that didn’t count as his mark, if we’re going by the paintings.”
“Oh, please.” Sasha waves a hand. “Jon’s probably paranoid because of finding Gertrude’s shot-up body in the tunnels. That’s not a supernatural death, that’s something provable and possibly human. Was I—or the Not-Me—his top suspect?”
“No?” Martin Prime’s forehead puckers in a frown. “Actually, you—it—was the one he suspected least. At least at first. That doesn’t mean he trusted you, mind, but he did at least think you the least likely suspect.”
“Then the Not-Me didn’t mark him because it wasn’t what made him paranoid,” Sasha says. “If he’d been in his right mind, he’d have suspected me most of all because I put in for the Archivist position, so the logical conclusion would have been that I killed Gertrude Robinson in hopes of getting it and then might be out to kill him so I could take the job from him. He was on edge because of what happened, and what I’m guessing was the general atmosphere of mistrust and tension in the Archives at the time probably made it worse—but it wasn’t the Not-Me’s doing. You, on the other hand, were directly targeted by it, so any paranoia you felt was because of it. Hence the mark.”
Martin Prime blinks in her direction. “That…God, you’re right. I never thought of that before.” He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “Do me a favor?”
“Don’t mention that to Jon, either?”
“Don’t—yeah. He’s got by all this time by reassuring himself that he wouldn’t have acted like that if the Not-Sasha hadn’t been there, but…” Martin Prime sighs and looks up at her. “I will tell him. It’s not fair not to. But just…let me do it?”
“Of course,” Sasha promises. “Despite how I’ve been acting tonight, I can keep my mouth shut.”
“I know. You knew I’d lied on my CV and never said anything.”
The kettle whistles from the kitchen, making Martin Prime flinch slightly. Sasha looks briefly over her shoulder. “They’ll be out in a few minutes.”
Martin Prime hums in acknowledgment. “Anything else you want to ask me while it’s just the two of us?”
Sasha can’t help but laugh. “Are you sure you don’t remember me?”
“Hey, I didn’t say the Not-Sasha was completely different from you, necessarily. It just looked and sounded different.”
“Fair point.” Sasha considers. She looks in the direction of the kitchen again and thinks of the paintings Martin Prime described. She looks back at Martin Prime and says softly, “Did we suffer? Either of us?”
Martin Prime swallows hard. “You, yes. The—the Not-Sasha bragged about how much it hurt you. Tim…I don’t know. The actual moment of his death might have been quick, but he was definitely suffering beforehand. Maybe not physically, but still, he was hurting and neither Jon nor I could do anything to fix it. Believe me, I tried.”
Sasha bites her lip and nods before remembering he can’t see it. “If you couldn’t fix it…I don’t think it was something that could be fixed.”
Martin Prime smiles. “Thanks, Sasha.”
A moment later, Tim pokes his head in the living room and announces, “Here we come. Tea’s up.”
He and Martin come into the room, Martin concentrating hard on holding onto a mug with each hand and Tim carrying two in each hand like it’s no big deal. He sets them down on the coffee table, then picks one up and hands it to Sasha with an overdramatic flourish. “Your hummingbird food, milady.”
“Why, thank you, kind sir,” Sasha drawls, accepting the mug. It’s not the one she had her coffee in earlier, thank God, but she does wonder just how many mugs Tim has.
Martin sets down one of his mugs, then sits on the sofa with the other carefully cradled in his bandaged hands. Tim picks up the other mug and presents it to Martin Prime. “And here, this one’s yours. We picked a mug with a sculpted handle, so you should be able to tell it apart from the others if you set it down.”
“Oh, thank you.” Martin Prime reaches out hesitantly. Tim meets him halfway, settling the cup on his palm and turning it slightly so that it brushes his fingers and he’s able to wrap them around the handle. “As long as you’re not making me drink out of a horse’s ass.”
It’s probably a combination of the fact that it’s a joke at just the right time and the unexpectedness of Martin Prime using a profanity, even a mild and correctly-applied one, but the heavy mood shatters like spun sugar. Sasha and Martin both burst into giggles at Tim’s exaggerated expression of shock as his eyes go back and forth from Martin Prime to the white mug with a sculpted face and painted horn on one side and a sweeping, rainbow-colored tail for a handle on the other.